IRS rehired hundreds of employees with histories of poor performance

(Image credit: Illustrated | SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

published 9 February 2015

The Internal Revenue Service has been much in the news lately over the agency's complaints that it lacks adequate funding and staff to manage the 2015 tax season effectively. But a new report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) suggests that the staffers the IRS does have may be more worrisome than the ones it doesn't.

That's because the IRS rehired some 323 former employees between January 2010 and July 2013 who had previously left the agency for being terrible at their jobs. While some were merely "failing critical job elements at the time they had separated from their prior employment with the IRS," others had committed more serious offenses, like looking at people's tax records that they were not authorized to view.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.