U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) recently helped introduce the Republican-led IRS Customer Service Improvement Act to rectify how many current IRS employees are spending much of their time on the job completing tasks unrelated to their official duties, called taxpayer-funded union time.
“Our bill will prohibit IRS staff from leaving their duty stations during tax filing season to complete union work to make certain that American taxpayers are getting the assistance they deserve,” Sen. Rounds said on Monday.
Introduced on June 17 by U.S. Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) and several other Republicans, S. 2132 would limit the use of taxpayer-funded union time for employees of the IRS, according to the congressional record bill summary.
“Further bloating our federal bureaucracy is not the answer to the current customer service problem at the IRS,” said Sen. Rounds. “We need the staff at the IRS to fully focus their attention on taxpayers, especially during tax season.”
Taxpayer-funded union time is when federal employees perform representational work for a bargaining unit in lieu of their regularly assigned work. In other words, federal employees performing taxpayer-funded union time are paid by federal taxpayers to do union work versus the duty stations jobs they were hired to perform, according to information provided by Sen. Rounds’ office.
If enacted, S. 2132 would require that during IRS tax filing season, the priority must be serving federal taxpayers with the highest quality service and not doing representational work.
The measure also would supersede existing Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs), which prevents stalling of renegotiations. Going forward CBA terms cannot authorize official time use during tax season, the information says.
The bill has been referred to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee for consideration.