Who Gets Rewarded for Stiffing the IRS? IRS Agents!

If you and I pay the Internal Revenue Service
less than it claims it owes us, we can get slammed pretty hard with
fines,
penalties, and even
jail time. The IRS even
stages armed raids in its search for a few more sheckels to
feed the government’s appetite. We even can get dinged $5,000 for
filing “frivolous” returns that just annoy the tax
collectors.

But there is one class of people that can misbehave and even
stiff the IRS, and receive rewards in return. Who has that sweet
deal? IRS employees.

According to a press release from the Treasury
Inspector General for Tax Administration:

between October 1, 2010 and December 31, 2012, more than 2,800
employees with recent substantiated conduct issues resulting in
disciplinary action received more than $2.8 million in monetary
awards and more than 27,000 hours in time-off awards. Among these,
more than 1,100 IRS employees with substantiated Federal tax
compliance problems received more than $1 million in cash awards
and more than 10,000 hours in time-off awards.

Whoops!

Among the most serious misconduct the
full report revealed among employees who were later awarded was
“late payment and/or nonpayment of Federal taxes, Government travel
card misuse or delinquency, Section 1203(b) violations, misconduct,
and fraud issues.”

Section 1203(b)
violations include assaults on, harassment of, and retaliation
against taxpayers, if you’re curious.

To put this in context, the full report notes that for 2011, the
IRS awarded almost $92 million in cash and almost 520,000 hours of
time off to 70,500 of its approximately 104,400 employees. So there
are plenty of goodies to go around, and they’re not all going to
malefactors, as the tax agency defines them. But still, to be a tax
collector who skates along on the company credit card, abuses
taxpayers, and holds back on your own taxes while getting a pat on
the back and a bonus has to be a pretty sweet deal.

The inspector general’s office urged the IRS to consider
requiring management to take into account conduct issues resulting
in disciplinary actions, especially the nonpayment of taxes, prior
to awarding all types of performance and discretionary awards.

They’ll get right on that. Right after they finishing
scrutinizing your tax return for clerical errors.