As accountants know all too well, busy season stops for nothing. Not even Elon Musk.
IRS staff won’t be permitted to resign under the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)’s “deferred resignation” plan until a month after the tax filing deadline, the agency informed employees. “Critical” employees in “Taxpayer Services, Information Technology and the Taxpayer Advocate Service are exempt” from the plan until May 15, the IRS said in a letter to employees, the AP reported.
The OPM, acting under directives from the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, has offered most federal employees paid administrative leave until September 30 if they agree to resign. Around 50,000 of the 2.3 million staff in the federal workforce have accepted the offer, the Washington Post reported. It’s not clear how much administrative leave resigning IRS employees would get, according to AP.
Unions representing federal employees requested that the “deferred resignation” plan be halted, and on February 6, a federal judge paused the plan until a hearing could be held. The buyout plan has received intense criticism from Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who called it a “scam” that could “decimate our civil service and cause immeasurable harm to the American public.”
Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), told the Associated Press that she doesn’t recommend staff take the resignation offer. “This is not a good deal for them,” she said. “If you sign this document and then later change your mind, you are left without any power to fight back.” The NTEU represents around two-thirds of IRS employees and 150,000 people in total.
OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover told the Federal News Network that the plan was “thoroughly vetted and intentionally designed to support employees through restructuring.”
The resignation offers come at a tentative time for the IRS. The agency used Inflation Reduction Act funds to hire around 2,000 more customer service representatives in 2023, which helped it to answer 9 million more phone calls from taxpayers, and cut wait times. But Congress cut $40 billion in IRS funding in 2023 and 2024, imperiling its progress, National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins wrote in a report.
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