What do you do?
So briefly, if the IRS sends you a notice that you owe money, you can contest that in the Tax Court. I work for the office of attorneys that represents the government in that court.
How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?
I was in private sector before, in an auto injury firm. I felt a little stuck in my old job, so I applied for this job to do something different. I also was drawn to the idea of public service. Both my husband and I considered the military, but we’re medically ineligible. My family is full of teachers, which is something I had considered before covid.
What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?
I appreciate that our job is to give people a chance to tell the government they’re wrong. The IRS messes up sometimes, and I appreciate that the ethos of the office is that our job is to be right, not to defend whatever the government is doing. We’ve absolutely gotten cases and said “Yep, the taxpayer is right and we need to tell the IRS to back off”. My job is largely clerical, so for me the proud moments are things like organizing a very messy file room or dealing with backlogs. Important things to be sure! But not exciting. The kind of unsung stuff needed to keep an organization running.
What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?
The IRS is definitely a big faceless entity, and while they’re extremely important, they can also be confusing and impersonal. So, having a whole couple departments specifically for people to say “Hey, the IRS is wrong”, and be heard and worked with is really important. You don’t have to go through some giant court proceeding with judges who are more used to criminal trials to contest your tax bill — there’s a whole system that knows how to hear you out, and make sure the government is only taking as much of your money as it’s allowed to.
What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it’s all going to impact your work and your mission?
I’m out of probation, and our office wasn’t affected by the cuts this week. We don’t know why. In general, people are expecting a proper RIF at some point, just because we can’t go unaffected by the IRS cuts for too long, but we’re not really sure what the future will look like. I don’t know about across the country, but we lost about 10% of folks to the deferred retirement. Most of them were retirement-eligible, so thats a lot of good experience leaving all at once. We hired the majority of our staff in the last couple years. Those folks retiring represent a substantial amount of the experience and organizational knowledge of the office. Ultimately it means we’ll be providing worse advice to the client, doing less well in court and losing cases we shouldn’t, and having a hard time keeping our knowledge base.
I think a lot of government is a mystery to people, until they interact with it — I know I hadn’t heard of some of the agencies being targeted before. Hopefully, this whole episode shows people just how many things the government does. I’m hearing from management that they have no idea how we’re going to be able to backfill a lot of those roles. I’m optimistic, but even in an agency with no firings and no funding cuts, we’re not going to be able to fix things for a long time. That’s maybe the biggest takeaway for me right now. All that’s happened for us is an uptick in retirements, and it’s still going to take a while to recover. The places getting really gutted are going to have a long road ahead, no matter what.
These cuts are super anti-efficiency, and they cost us all money by making it easier to be a tax cheat, if you’ve got the resources. I think everyone knows the whole efficiency thing is horseshit, but the stuff with the IRS and sister offices really makes it clear what a lie that is. The perverse thing is that the complex stuff is the business and high earner taxes, so those will take longer to recover. Joe Schmo not filing his taxes is easy.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 