The IRS rehired hundreds of employees who had acted inappropriately and performed poorly on the job, including some who had problems paying their own taxes.
The inspector general released a report Thursday indicating that 824 of the total 7,168 employees rehired between Jan. 1, 2010 and Sept. 30, 2013 "had substantiated employment issues."
"For example," said Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George, "141 rehired former employees had a prior tax issue."
Five of those employees were rehired even though the IRS knew they willfully refused to file their taxes within the last two years.
An additional 108 of the rehired employees had misconduct issues, some of which were significant. These include unauthorized access of taxpayer accounts; fraud; falsification of employment forms and official documents; misuse of email, Internet and property; misconduct such as threats, sexual harassment, and criminal conduct; and absence and leave, workplace disruption, or failure to follow instructions, according to the report.
One example given was an employee who took eight weeks of unauthorized vacation only to be rehired. The manager had even written a note on the employee's file explicitly saying, "do not rehire."
Nearly 20 percent of the employees still had problems after they were rehired, the report noted.
Rehiring employees with these types of known conduct and performance issues "presents increased risk to the IRS and taxpayers," George warned.
The IRS issued an official response to the report, saying that it follows the Office of Personnel Management guidelines and believes it already does enough to prevent bad actors from being hired, reported The Washington Times.
"IRS has fully evaluated this recommendation and determined its current process is more than adequate to mitigate any risks to American taxpayers, federal agencies and its employees," wrote Daniel T. Riordan, an agency Human Capital Officer, in a reply memo. "IRS already fully considers prior conduct and performance issues before the final job offer is issued to all new hires."
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, said the report is shocking, especially as President Barack Obama has recently proposed a significant increase in the IRS budget, including plans to hire 9,000 new agency workers, the Times reported.
"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," Hatch said.
He promised to pressure the IRS to implement new rules to prevent the agency from rehiring bad employees in the future.
