So, the IRS is taking action to deal with its backlog.   In my mind, the wrong action.  And, yes, I know doing something is often better than doing nothing, but this something bothers me.

The IRS ran a major job fair in Ogden, UT.  (OK, it was really Clearfield, a suburb about 8 miles out from Ogden.)  That’s one of the biggest places where our 24 million unprocessed tax returns, correspondences, and special filings have been piling up since the beginning of the pandemic.  As we’ve discussed, this backlog accumulation is the result of pandemic shutdowns, decimated workforces, new stimulus measure the IRS had to deliver to taxpayers, as well as manual data entry.

And, the  jobs the IRS was offering were going to pay  $ 15.61 an hour (clerk and tax examiner).   Yes, that means these folks would barely clearly more than $ 30,000 a year.  (There are some 5000 jobs which the IRS desperately wants to fill in Ogden, Austin [TX], and Kansas City [MO]- the big 3 of paper return processing units at the IRS.  And, given the aging of the IRS workforce, the IRS will have to hire 52000 folks by 2028 just to have the same decimated number of employees they currently have.)

Of course, no one seemed to recognize that paying such paltry wages will not excite the population.  Especially when the unemployment rate in Utah is 2.1%- the lowest in the nation (tied with Nebraska, by the way).  [OK, the Ogden region has a slightly higher unemployment rate- all of 2.3%.)  And, the nearby US Air Force base, Amazon facility, and an automotive supplier are starting their pay at $ 17 to $ 18 an hour.

And, now let’s get real.  The folks that enter the paper tax returns are not perfect.  And, paper returns are not a one and done operation- they are handled by IRS employees about a dozen times before they are finally fully entered into the system.  (And, the error rate has been as high as 22% recently.)

Perhaps that explains why the “criteria” for hiring new folks were so “stringent”.  If you had a high school degree plus 1 year of additional education followed by 6 months of full-time work- you’d get a job offer.   (You do realize that work-from-home is not an option for the IRS.  They don’t want our tax returns leaving their facility.)

Now, what would make more sense to me is to hire fewer folks and obtain some high speed, professional scanning devices.   That way more returns could be processed.  Of course, that also assumes that the IRS has software to integrate those scanned returns.  (Trust me- even with antiquated systems, that sort of kludge connection could be developed.)

So, maybe, someday soon the IRS backlog will evanesce.

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