7,000 employees ordered to be rehired and put back to work are likely to be fired again.
Washington, D.C.– Kelly Reyes, Executive Director of the Professional Managers Association (PMA)–formed in1981 by Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Managers as a national membership association representing the interests of professional managers, management officials and non-bargaining unit employees in the federal government and within the IRS–issued the following statement in response to reports that IRS will bring 7,000 previously fired probationary employees back to work later this month:
“Thanks to funding from Congress, the IRS has been aggressively hiring desperately needed new staff to rebuild the IRS’ capacity to deliver the service taxpayers expect and deserve. These investments have worked, with the American people seeing massive improvements to customer service, wait times, and tech-enabled capabilities in he past two years alone.”
“Probationary employees at the IRS represent the agency’s future. They include new employees beginning their public service career, and employees recently promoted into new roles of higher responsibility, including newly promoted managers and executive leaders. Firing thousands of these professionals was a decision PMA disagreed with, especially with the action occurring during tax season.”
“Rehiring them now per the court’s order, with the presumed expectation of simply firing them again in another few weeks or months of time once the administration can remedy it’s illegal firing process, seems like the opposite of efficient or a smart use of taxpayers’ money. While I hope these IRS professionals will be allowed to return and remain in service, if that is not the administration’splan, those employees should be allowed to remain on paid administrative leavestatus and prevent the multiple disruptions and stresses of returning and thenreleasing these employees again.”
“IRS managers have important and challenging enough jobs without a constant stream of new distractions and edicts that have not been thought fully through. Onboarding thousands of employees just to presumably offboard them again makes no sense. No business would operate like this. No business would stay in business like this.”
