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Washington Post: Hundreds of IRS employees are skipping work. That could delay tax refunds.
Hundreds of IRS employees are skipping work. That could delay tax refunds.
The IRS building in Kansas City, Mo., on Jan. 17. Hundreds of employees are skipping work due to financial hardship, and union officials expect a surge of absences as the government shutdown continues. (Christopher Smith/For The Washington Post)
By Danielle Paquette, Lisa Rein, Jeff Stein and Kimberly Kindy
January 22 at 7:50 PM
Hundreds of Internal Revenue Service employees have received permission to skip work during the partial government shutdown due to financial hardship, and union leaders said Tuesday they expected absences to surge as part of a coordinated protest that could hamper the government’s ability to process taxpayer refunds on time.
The Trump administration last week ordered at least 30,000 IRS workers back to their offices, where they have been working to process refunds without pay. It was one of the biggest steps the government has taken to mitigate the shutdown’s impact on Americans’ lives. But IRS employees across the country — some in coordinated protest, others out of financial necessity — won’t be clocking in, according to Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, and several local union officials. The work action is widespread and includes employees from a processing center in Ogden, Utah, to the Brookhaven campus on New York’s Long Island.
The move is the leading edge of pushback from within the IRS, and it signals the potential for civil servants to take actions that could slow or cripple government functions as the shutdown’s political stalemate continues in Washington. U.S. Department of Agriculture meat inspectors have begun to call in sick, Transportation Security Administration sickouts at airports have been rising, and federal law enforcement agencies say the shutdown is increasing stress among agents and affecting investigations.
“They are definitely angry that they’re not getting paid, and maybe some of them are angry enough to express their anger this way,” said Reardon, whose union represents 150,000 employees at 33 federal agencies and departments. “But these employees live paycheck to paycheck, and they can’t scrape up the dollars to get to work or pay for child care.”
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More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/hundreds-of-irs-employees-are-skipping-work-that-could-delay-tax-refunds/2019/01/22/1885e74e-1e7d-11e9-8e21-59a09ff1e2a1_story.html
The IRS building in Kansas City, Mo., on Jan. 17. Hundreds of employees are skipping work due to financial hardship, and union officials expect a surge of absences as the government shutdown continues. (Christopher Smith/For The Washington Post)
By Danielle Paquette, Lisa Rein, Jeff Stein and Kimberly Kindy
January 22 at 7:50 PM
Hundreds of Internal Revenue Service employees have received permission to skip work during the partial government shutdown due to financial hardship, and union leaders said Tuesday they expected absences to surge as part of a coordinated protest that could hamper the government’s ability to process taxpayer refunds on time.
The Trump administration last week ordered at least 30,000 IRS workers back to their offices, where they have been working to process refunds without pay. It was one of the biggest steps the government has taken to mitigate the shutdown’s impact on Americans’ lives. But IRS employees across the country — some in coordinated protest, others out of financial necessity — won’t be clocking in, according to Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, and several local union officials. The work action is widespread and includes employees from a processing center in Ogden, Utah, to the Brookhaven campus on New York’s Long Island.
The move is the leading edge of pushback from within the IRS, and it signals the potential for civil servants to take actions that could slow or cripple government functions as the shutdown’s political stalemate continues in Washington. U.S. Department of Agriculture meat inspectors have begun to call in sick, Transportation Security Administration sickouts at airports have been rising, and federal law enforcement agencies say the shutdown is increasing stress among agents and affecting investigations.
“They are definitely angry that they’re not getting paid, and maybe some of them are angry enough to express their anger this way,” said Reardon, whose union represents 150,000 employees at 33 federal agencies and departments. “But these employees live paycheck to paycheck, and they can’t scrape up the dollars to get to work or pay for child care.”
<...>
More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/hundreds-of-irs-employees-are-skipping-work-that-could-delay-tax-refunds/2019/01/22/1885e74e-1e7d-11e9-8e21-59a09ff1e2a1_story.html
Apparently the NTEU contract they have allows them to take off for a "hardship".
8 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
I respect them for not wanting to be indentured servants...and yet the rest of us are gonna suffer too, cuz some of us DEPEND on that EIC/Refund to pay off debt and just TRY to get ahead once a year...
greaaaat... 
