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IRS Employee Union Seeks Agency Plan for Coronavirus

Posted on Mar. 5, 2020

The National Treasury Employees Union is meeting this week with the IRS on how the agency seeks to protect its workers from the coronavirus.

“Candidly, I don’t think agencies — at least so far — they’ve not been very forthcoming with information to their employees,” NTEU President Tony Reardon told reporters March 4 at the union’s 2020 legislative conference in Washington.

Reardon said he met last week with IRS deputy commissioners about their plans for dealing with a possible pandemic. He said the commissioners told him there is a plan, but that it wouldn’t be ready to share with the union until IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig had been briefed.

Reardon said he expects plans to include employee rules of conduct in an effort to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus, while the provision of gloves and hand sanitizer should be discussed.

“You’ve got folks in the IRS who today their job is extraction, for example, where they’re pulling the returns out of envelopes,” Reardon said. “My understanding is that this virus they think could live on things for 21 days. Are they providing the gloves?”

The IRS should also determine who needs to be in the workplace, with contingencies for telework, Reardon said.

Speaking separately to reporters after a House subcommittee hearing on the IRS’s fiscal 2021 budget, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin downplayed the potential impact of the coronavirus on the tax filing season.

“There’s nothing specifically at the moment that would suggest that that level of risk is any different from anything else, but let me just say it’s an evolving situation,” Mnuchin said.

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