Something to rage-fuel your tax filing season: the IRS rehired hundreds of employees who cheated on or misfiled their own taxes, committed fraud, falsified documents, and engaged in a range of other types of misconduct. At least five had willfully failed to file any taxes at all.
According to the Inspector General report–some of which has been redacted—141 rehired employees had had some kind of problem with their taxes. 11 had accessed the accounts of other taxpayers without the proper authorization. Four had committed some time of fraud, and 17 had falsified documents. Three had previously been fired for abusing their leave.
In at least one case, a manager had actually left explicit instructions to ban rehiring of the employee: “[T]he Chief, Processing Division, stated “do not rehire” because the individual had been absent without leave for a total of 312 hours. Nonetheless, the employee was still rehired.”
And once rehired, 20 percent of employees were caught in more bad behavior.
The report chides this pattern, noting that “the time spent by IRS managers addressing performance and conduct issues is time taken away from serving taxpayers and enforcing the tax law.” Even worse, in the case of those who had abused tax filings in the past, “the IRS has put taxpayers at increased risk.”
Out of the 7,000 total employees rehired between 2010 and 2013, 824 had “issues” in their records.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) told the Washington Times he was stunned by the report: “IRS employees must be held to high standards to ensure that taxpayers are protected, and there is no reason to hire employees who have already failed to uphold those expectations.”
Whether targeting people they don’t like, losing emails, or giving job opportunities to snooping tax cheats–the IRS is there to remind everyone how competent government really is.
