I read in the news that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) paid out millions in bonuses to the its employees. Nothing wrong with rewarding good behavior and good job performance. But in some cases the behavior was not as good as I think it should be. I don’t know about job performance so I won’t comment on that.

But according to the news, over a thousand of these employees who collected over a million dollars in bonuses had issues with tax compliance themselves. If we include other types of conduct problems the numbers are 2,800 employees and over $2.8 million in bonuses.

The IRS has policy linking conduct and performance bonuses for executives and senior level employees but not for the entire workforce. The quote below is from the news article cited above.

“Even without a formal policy in place over the past four years, the IRS has not issued awards to any executives that were subject to a disciplinary action,” the IRS said in a statement. “We are also considering a similar policy for the entire IRS workforce, which would be subject to negotiations with the National Treasury Employees Union.”

I find it hard to believe the union would oppose such a policy, except for adding any due process concerns they have. And it should also be noted that these apparent tax cheats getting bonuses are only a small percentage of the work force.

But why should a tax cheat collect a bonus from a government that is being cheated by an employees. Some would argue that the employee should be reward for good job performance despite any tax compliance issues. But if these tax compliance issues are proved, should not any bonuses be applied to the tax owed?

.