Now that the excitement of the holiday season is over, Americans are collectively dreading a much less joyful occasion – tax season.
Thoughts of the IRS may conjure images of accountants dutifully processing paperwork. However, recent investigations have uncovered misconduct at taxpayer expense.
Did you know, that under current policy, an IRS employee that gets fired for misconduct can be rehired and continue working for the agency?
A recent Inspector General Report found that employees who were fired for offenses like fraud, falsification of documents, and unauthorized access to taxpayer information were later rehired by the agency. One fired employee even had “DO NOT REHIRE” written in their personnel file and was still later rehired by the IRS.
I think this is absolutely unacceptable.
This week, I introduced the Ensuring Integrity in the IRS Workforce Act of 2016 to ban employees who have been fired from ever working for the agency again.
The American people expect government to be accountable.
Over the last year, I have introduced several bills to reform the broken IRS. You can read more about the IRS Accountability Act and the No Bonuses for Tax Cheats Act on my website.
I will not stop fighting to clean up the mess at the IRS.