Human Capital - IRS
THE IRS's challenge of having the right people in the right place at the right time is made more difficult by many complex internal and external factors. The work performed by IRS employees continually requires greater expertise as tax laws become more complex, manual systems used to support tax administration become computer-based, and attempts by taxpayers and tax practitioners to evade compliance with the tax laws become more sophisticated. The IRS must also compete with other Federal, State, and local governmental agencies and the private sector for the same human resources, an effort that becomes more complicated as younger generations of employees move between jobs more frequently than employees in the past. Furthermore, budget constraints, legislative changes, and economic shifts can create unforeseen challenges for the IRS in addressing its long-term human capital issues.
The IRS is improving in its human capital management practices and has developed a comprehensive agency-wide recruitment strategy. However, there is still much work left to be done. For example, the IRS, like other Government agencies, was struggling to accomplish the basic tasks in acquisition workforce planning, including identifying its acquisition workforce, determining the number of acquisition workforce personnel it needs to accomplish its mission, and determining the skills its employees have compared to the skills it requires. If the IRS does not take action to improve its acquisition workforce planning, it: (1) may not be able to easily determine whether its acquisition workforce has enough people with the right skills to perform acquisition duties, (2) may be understaffed to handle the anticipated acquisition workload, and (3) may not have all the prerequisite skills to oversee procurements.
The IRS also faces challenges to maintain the number of Revenue Officers needed, due to attrition and an increasing inventory. The IRS's Revenue Officer hiring initiative added 1,515 new Revenue Officers throughout the country between June 2009 and February 2010. The methodology to assign these new employees was effective in placing them in the Collection areas with the greatest need. However, even though 1,515 Revenue Officers were hired over a nine-month period, the net increase was only 580 Revenue Officers. The IRS has also projected that planned hiring for Fiscal Years 2011 and 2012 will barely cover attrition losses.
This is not about the Indian Revenue Service but about the Internal Revenue Service of USA – from a report by the Inspector General for Tax Administration.