FOIA reveals 200 IRS employees work for union full time

Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request from Americans for Limited Government, the Internal Revenue Service revealed that 200 of its “employees” actually work full time for the National Treasury Employees Union, or NTEU. The special union arrangement, known as “official time,” means that rather than working on investigating and collecting taxes, public workers whose...

Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request from Americans for Limited Government, the Internal Revenue Service revealed that 200 of its “employees” actually work full time for the National Treasury Employees Union, or NTEU.

The special union arrangement, known as “official time,” means that rather than working on investigating and collecting taxes, public workers whose wages and benefits are paid for by taxpayers work for a union instead, processing grievances and perhaps even doing political work. Many of these union operatives earn more than $100,000 per year.

Under the “official time” arrangement, these employees are lifted directly from important administrative work. Rather than being listed as union operatives, they use their government job titles (here’s the list), so every department in the IRS risks having a file clerk, agent or attorney with specialized training or years of experience whisked off to do union work instead. That can’t help the agency in its central mission of fairly administering our very complex tax code.

There may be others: the IRS’s FOIA response only covered employees who work on union business full time. There are likely to be more workers who switch back and forth between working for taxpayers and the union.

In a related story, Social Security numbers for tens of thousands of private citizens were inadvertently revealed when the IRS posted filings it received from nonprofits. The tax agency routinely makes the forms available to the public, but is expected to redact personal information first. The public interest group Public.Resource.org found at least two instances where the IRS released this information without scrubbing Social Security numbers first.

One has to wonder: if those 200 IRS employees were working for taxpayers instead of the NTEU, maybe one of those clerks or agents would have made sure that all of the personal information had been blotted out before those forms went online. As long as they are earning a government salary, government workers should work for taxpayers and nobody else.