An estimated 6,000 IRS employees have outside jobs or are involved in extracurricular businesses, but only half of them are doing so with permission from their superiors, according to a Department of the Treasury watchdog.
Even worse, the federal tax agency’s human resources department apparently isn’t doing anything about it, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said.
“IRS Human Capital Office management was generally not aware of the number of employees with unapproved outside employment because responsibility has not been assigned for overseeing the overall outside employment process,” TIGTA said in a report made public Thursday.
The human resources staffers told TIGTA that their office “does not have authorization to use taxpayer information (e.g., Form W-2, Wage and Tax Statement) to identify employees with unapproved outside income because Internal Revenue Code Section 6103 does not clearly provide that tax data can be used for this purpose.”
Even worse, almost all of the records that are on hand are out of date.
“It will be difficult for the IRS to monitor outside employment because 93 percent of the existing records in the database used to compile outside employment requests are out of date,” TIGTA said.
The problem is significant because TIGTA found multiple instances of employees with questionable workloads outside of government.
“One employee pled guilty to engaging in a criminal conflict of interest for accessing taxpayer information for the purpose of conducting a private tax and accounting business,” TIGTA said.
In addition, the Treasury watchdog said “44 IRS employees prepared tax returns for compensation (a prohibited practice), and TIGTA’s analysis identified 20 employees with a high risk of potential conflicts of interest who received outside income without documented approval.”
More than a few of the IRS moonlighters were making big bucks outside the tax agency:
“For example, four employees operated businesses with annual gross receipts ranging from more than $500,000 to more than $7 million, and six employees had wages of more than $50,000 from outside of the IRS.”
TIGTA said IRS officials mostly agreed with their recommendations for solving the problem. The one they rejected was using employees’ “income information” to determine if they are breaking the law or violating federal regulations.
IRS employees processed more than 136 million individual and corporate tax returns for 2013, every one of which required reviewing the filers’ income information.
Go here for the full report.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
