TheAgitator.com
Starving the Hand that Feeds Them
Monday, September 15th, 2008Federal News Radio reports that more than a half million federal employees owe some $3.59 billion in federal income taxes. The biggest scofflaws are the Post Office (in raw numbers) and the Government Printing Office (by percentage). The list also includes the Executive Office of the President (where 58 employees owe $320,000), and 1,000 staffers on Capitol Hill.
I was surprised to learn that except for the IRS, the federal government does not consider failure to pay federal taxes a firing offense. Surprised, that is, until I remembered that when you’re a federal employee, virtually nothing is actually a firing offense.
In the past, the report has included data from the IRS the percentage of tax cheats in the general population, but the IRS apparently stopped making that information available a couple of years ago.
I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.
I was all ready to respond to you halfway through the 2nd paragraph until I saw you already put “virtually nothing is actually a firing offense”. It is ridiculous how hard it is to fire a government employee.
“I was surprised to learn that except for the IRS, the federal government does not consider failure to pay federal taxes a firing offense. Surprised, that is, until I remembered that when you’re a federal employee, virtually nothing is actually a firing offense.”
Surprise is out of order.
Government is not a business. It will never be run like a business because failure is rewarded — nay, desired.
Such is reality when payrolls are financed by force instead of persuasion. So it will be always.
Perhaps we can name this practice of government employees keeping their jobs while owing back income taxes “Rangel-ing.”
chsw
I work for the federal government. We’ve lost 4 people in the past 2 years for sleeping on the job. FWIW.
Wait – $3.59 billion dollars for (roughly) 0.5 million employees? Holy cats! That’s like $70,000 average per scofflaw fed! I have to say, that seems like an awfully high number. That’s got to be over a year’s salary for many of them.
The real shock here is that the IRS apparently knows about these people and let’s them skate. Being fired is one thing, but wage attachment, asset seizure, and jail are on the table, aren’t they? I have a feeling that, if the IRS knew that I owed them seventy grand, I would either be scraping that money together or listening to a judge about how much of my stuff the government was going to take.
Well, if you think about it – federal employees don’t pay any federal tax at all (as in, the money is withheld from their check, and they never see it again…) – whatever is withheld, comes back in their next check…
Playing ping-pong with the GAO…
The exception to the above, is the USPS (highest number of delinquents, in raw numbers) – they are the only agency that is self-sufficient (thru the sale of postage), i.e. not funded by tax revenue. They are also the most “efficient” federal agency. Hmm…
I wrote a module for one of IRS’s computer systems back in the early 80’s (I was a consultant – main-frame programmer/analyst). In those days, an IRS employee could be fired for submitting a tax return with a mistake on it…
Wrong wrong wrong. Federal employees can be fired very easily, as long as management has properly documented the poor performance and/or misconduct. What tends to happen though is that managers are too lazy or too ignorant to properly rate and discipline employees, so that when the time comes to fire they have nothing to back it up.
Now, in the private sector that’s a feature, not a bug. Helps grease the wheels of the free market and whatnot. In gub’mint though, allowing managers to fire without checks and balances is a recipe for politically motivated firing. I understand most readers here aren’t exactly fans of the bureaucracy, but keeping it fairly non-partisan is important.
As for the pay for per performance recommendation, that has already been implemented, with mixed results, mainly bad. Because there are no free market incentives, you don’t get free market results. E.g. if I fire good workers in my company for less competant workers, I may find myself at a competitive disadvantage, and go out of business. In the federal government, management sets what metrics will be counted, and so if a manager rewards cronys rather than real performance (or let’s be kind, and assume they just sets poor metrics to judge performance against) the group rarely if ever goes “out of business”.
I can’t tell from the article, is this failed to pay income tax as in “The 16th Amendment was never passed”, or as in “We examined your return and found you miscalculated the basis for these capital gains, please return the enclosed form to work out a payment plan”?