Emails: IRS worker got $138,000 to do 'nothing' --- and union saved her job
By Paul Bedard | September 10, 2014 | 3:11 pm
Underperforming IRS workers are being protected from firing by the National Treasury Employees Union in the tax agency that let workers devote 500,000 hours — worth over $20 million in salary — on labor activities last year, according to internal emails revealed Wednesday.
The House Ways and Means Committee said that emails from former IRS executive Lois Lerner, being probed for her involvement in the agency’s targeting of conservatives, show she vented at being blocked from firing one worker who did “nothing,” yet still received up to $138,136 a year.
The email prompted Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., the chairman of the oversight committee, to demand answers from IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.
In a letter to Koskinen, the lawmaker said, “No small business in America could keep its doors open if it paid employees for doing nothing.”
He is demanding details on how many employees have been sited for underperforming and their link to the union.
Boustany was already targeting the agency’s spending on union activities. In May, Secrets reported that the agency spent over 500,000 work hours on union activities at a cost to taxpayers of $23 million. Union work is allowed by federal law, but the amount and expense is under fire in Congress.
In a 2011 email recently uncovered by the committee, Lerner wrote to colleagues that she “learned than [an] employee who is assigned to a special project has spent most of the last year doing nothing and reporting to her manager on on timesheets that she has been working on the project full time.” The worker was paid $106,263-$138,136.
Lerner said that “We can’t do anything” about the worker, though some argued for termination, explained Boustany’s letter. Instead, the unnamed worker was given a lower performance rating.
Boustany concern is that other workers are getting away with doing nothing — and getting paid handsomely for it. “It is alarming that government workers can do no work for an entire year and not be fired, simply because of the union protection,” said the chairman.
“This latest discovery raises more red flags as to whether the IRS exercises even basic competence in managing personnel and whether it can be trusted with taxpayer funds,” added a committee official.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/emails-irs-worker-got-138000-to-do-nothing-and-union-saved-her-job/article/2553167
