IRS Cuts 218 Jobs Through 'Outsourcing'

by Mike Godfrey, Tax-News.com, New York

10 August 2004

The Bush administration's drive to outsource 850,000 federal jobs has made but slow progress, due partly to Union intransigence and partly to the administration's lack of experience in this area, but last week saw an announcement from the IRS that restructuring of the agency's information technology operations at 10 tax-processing sites would result in the loss of 218 jobs.

The cuts will reduce staffing at the agency's Modernization and IT Services mainframe printing operation to 60 jobs by June 1, 2005. "We have more employees than we have work in this particular operation," said Raymona Stickell, the IRS's director of competitive sourcing, adding that the lost jobs are a consequence of a competitive sourcing study that found technological solutions to reduce costs. "Instead of having to print the reports and distribute them within the campuses, they are now able to move 80 percent to work electronically the desktops," she said.

It's not clear that this technological initiative has got a lot to do with competitive sourcing, and Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, described the cuts as a direct result of IRS officials doing their best to meet the Bush administration's unstated quota of contracting out a certain percentage of federal jobs at each agency. As regards true 'competitive sourcing', it seems the Unions may have the upper hand: "We've done everything we can to slow it down, I'm very proud to say," said Kelley recently.

Recommended