What Else Is The IRS Doing Illegally. Has It Become A Rogue Agency?

IG Report: IRS illegally using audit quotas to measure agent performance

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Ben Bullard

You know how some police forces allegedly use quotas to make sure their officers are out doing the Lord’s work of writing people enough traffic tickets? Well, the IRS is taking the same approach to rating its agents’ performance, in some cases applying the quota metric to determine whether employees are auditing enough people and businesses.

That’s according to a September report, released publicly late last week, by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. What’s more, the use of quotas as an employee assessment metric was outlawed in the late 1990s. That makes their use within the IRS plainly illegal.

“On July 22, 1998, the President signed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 (RRA 98) into law,”notes the IG report. “RRA 98 Section (§) 1204 restricts the use of enforcement statistics.  Specifically, RRA 98 § 1204(a) restricts the use of enforcement statistics and prohibits the IRS from using any record of tax enforcement results (ROTER) to evaluate employees or to impose or suggest production quotas or goals.”

Here’s more on the 1998 law:

RRA 98 § 1204(b) requires employees to be evaluated using the fair and equitable treatment of taxpayers as a performance standard. The IRS refers to this standard as the retention standard.  The retention standard requires employees to administer the tax laws fairly and equitably; protect all taxpayers’ rights; and treat each taxpayer ethically with honesty, integrity, and respect.  This provision of the law was enacted to provide assurance that employee performance is focused on providing quality service to taxpayers instead of achieving enforcement results.

RRA 98 § 1204(c) requires each appropriate supervisor to perform a quarterly self‑certification.  In the self-certification, the appropriate supervisor attests to whether ROTERs, production quotas, or goals were used in a prohibited manner.

So, if we trust the government to police itself, the spirit of the law is on the taxpayers’ side. But, of course, that’s not how it’s played out in practice.

The report concludes that, as of 2013, some IRS supervisors were still using “tax enforcement results” (like the amount of money collected following an audit or the number of fraud cases an agent processes) to determine whether employees are doing a good job.

“The following issues were identified,” the report states:

* Section 1204(a) — 13 potential violations in which seven IRS managers used ROTERs to evaluate employees and/or suggest production quotas or goals.

* Section 1204(b) — 55 instances of documentation noncompliance in which 21 IRS managers did not maintain proper documentation that showed they evaluated their employees using the fair and equitable treatment of taxpayers as a performance standard.

* Section 1204(c) — three instances of noncompliance in which an IRS manager did not certify in writing to the IRS Commissioner or provide documentation whether ROTERs and/or production quotas or goals were used in a prohibited manner.

The same Inspector General’s office also made public a report last week revealing that the IRS has compromised the privacy of some private taxpayers. The report found instances in which the IRS failed to redact personal information from tax documents the agency has released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.