The IRS is expected to call more employees back to its offices starting the week of May 11, even though it still hasn’t deployed all of the 11,000 volunteers it asked for a week ago, an IRS managers’ representative said.
“There’s no denying that things are behind” in filing season operations, Chad Hooper, president of the Professional Managers Association, whose members include IRS executives and managers, said in a teleconference May 6. “The backlog of work is incredible,” he added.
IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig issued an evacuation order March 27 that emptied agency offices and facilities nationwide in an effort to protect workers and operations during the coronavirus pandemic. Hooper estimated that 44,000 IRS employees have been teleworking during the shutdown, while as many as 30,000 are on paid administrative leave because their homes aren’t suitable for agency work. The IRS announced April 25 that it would call back employee-volunteers to resume mission-critical, on-site work.
The IRS didn’t respond immediately to a request for an update about its latest back-to-work plans.
But Hooper said that Rettig’s evacuation order is still in effect, leaving open a lot of questions for senior IRS executives to answer about who qualifies for hazard pay, whether managers can be held personally liable for assigning employees to potentially dangerous assignments, and what guidance to follow for IRS staff protections.
Anecdotally, Hooper said he’s been told by association members that the availability of personal protective equipment varies greatly among the nearly 400 IRS facilities nationwide. The Kansas City, Missouri, processing center set aside a room where employees could pick up masks and other personal protective equipment, he said. By contrast, employees at a New York facility were asked to bring their own, he said.
Among returning managers and employees in the last couple of weeks, Hooper said, “Some people are worried, some people are scared, some people are excited to get back to work. . . . The majority of our people who are coming in to do this are doing so out of a concern for their community. [Taxpayers] want to know that the mail is being opened and the checks are being deposited.”
The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents IRS bargaining unit workers, didn’t respond to a request for comment or an update on workforce deployments.
‘Feel Like Miracles’
IRS employees are now required to wear masks inside agency facilities, and must usually obtain a manager’s approval to visit offices even briefly to drop off or pick up critical documents, Hooper said.
Yet some IRS operations are also reporting “long-standing technological limitations that now are beginning to attack our ability to be effective,” Hooper said.
The tax agency’s Austin, Texas, facility had to build a teleworking infrastructure without having any experience in the technology, Hooper said. The IRS’s Philadelphia campus has insufficient bandwidth to support extensive telework, he added. Agency operations in Andover, Massachusetts, are still rolling out equipment to allow IRS phone assisters to work securely from home, he said.
“We cannot effectively assist taxpayers using outdated technology that’s unable to rapidly adapt to the needs of the American people,” Hooper said.
“The pandemic really is shedding light on some of these long-standing needs that the IRS has had to modernize and bring our systems into the 21st century,” Hooper said. “Unfortunately, we’re simply not budgeted appropriately to make a lot of these vast improvements,” and maintain them if the crisis continues, he said.
Nevertheless, Hooper said he believes that if the IRS can get most of its workforce back on the job, the extended July 15 return filing deadline shouldn’t pose an insurmountable problem for the agency.
“I don’t think I can think of a word to overstate the negative impact [of the coronavirus emergency] on delivering our mission,” Hooper said. “I have been impressed every day . . . at things that feel like miracles, that IRS executives and management have been able to implement in order to continue our mission,” he said.