IRS Chief Counsel Handles Disciplinary Cases Properly -- for the Most Part

Despite some delays due to staffing shortages, the top legal office at the Internal Revenue Service properly adjudicated more than 600 reported cases of employee misconduct over a three-year period, a watchdog reported.

The office, however, was too lax in some of its punishments, the report released Monday by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found.

Offenses ranged from tax delinquency to travel and purchase card abuse to off-site misbehavior, according to the report. The 1,500 attorneys and other employees of the Chief Counsel are part of the Treasury Department “but not the IRS and are thus not subject to IRS conduct and discipline policies,” auditors noted. But “their conduct may have a negative effect on the IRS’ or Chief Counsel’s mission and the public’s confidence in the tax system.”

After IRS and the inspector general reported 627 cases of potential employee misconduct to the Chief Counsel from fiscal 2012-14, 67 resulted in discipline ranging from admonishment to removal; 209 resulted in non-disciplinary action such as oral counseling; 69 were still pending at the report’s completion; and 279 were closed with no action because the Chief Counsel found no misconduct or the employee separated, the report found. Three did not have a recorded disciplinary action because of delays in the Chief Counsel receiving the reported case.

The legal office delayed handling of many of the reported cases until August 2014, when it hired a new employee with primary responsibility for such processing. “During the period of delay in processing the cases, some Chief Counsel employees misused their purchase and travel cards multiple times before Chief Counsel addressed the misuse,” the IG wrote. “Seventy-two Chief Counsel employees were referred to Chief Counsel two or more times during our audit period for potential purchase card and travel card misuse.” In addition, 17 of the 72 Chief Counsel employees with multiple referrals had multiple instances of substantiated misconduct.

In several cases, auditors judged that disciplinary actions imposed “did not appear to be commensurate with the substantiated misconduct,” saying, “The disciplinary action imposed appeared to be too lenient given the egregious nature of the substantiated misconduct. Specifically, for several instances of sexually related misconduct, employees were given suspensions of five days or less.”

Those cases included a supervisor who sent a subordinate sexually explicit emails, text messages and telephone calls, and a GS-14 attorney who viewed sexually explicit material on a government computer for two-to-three hours per day for four months.

But TIGTA concluded that overall, the Chief Counsel “has an effective process for responding to allegations of misconduct for its employees.” The watchdog recommended that the office improve documentation procedures by consolidating related files at “one central location so that an employee’s entire conduct history could be considered when reviewing alleged misconduct.”

IRS Chief Counsel management agreed.

(Image via Brandon Bourdages / Shutterstock.com)