Preferences

1,500 employees who work at an Internal Revenue Service center in Andover, Massachusetts, are going to lose their jobs this year. The IRS is closing the center on the grounds that more people are filing their tax returns online, and so fewer people are needed to process online filings, something some lawmakers and advocates dispute, but is sort of besides the point for the point I want to make. Understandably, this is terrible for them, particularly in this economy, when many people are looking to government jobs as a safe haven. And so some Congressmen and the National Treasury Employees Union are asking that those employees be given a preference in hiring for jobs in the Troubled Asset Relief Program and other economic oversight positions.

Preferences are a really difficult issue. I had a conversation with someone a while ago who said that veterans preference was the unspoken elephant in the room of hiring reform, a roadblock to truly focusing on the most qualified candidates. Alternately, NTEU has argued that hiring authorities like the Federal Career Intern Program are a way to work around veterans preference and discriminate earlier. Clearly, there is an extremely difficult balance to be struck between rewarding veterans for their service in appropriate ways, and making sure that the quality of job applicants is the most important factor in hiring. In an ideal world, preferences would be extremely carefully tailored to make sure that they serve both purposes: appropriately rectifying a wrong or acting as a reward, and promoting extremely qualified candidates who might otherwise get lost in the shuffle.