The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal workers in 33 agencies and departments, including the IRS, said the IRS informed it that the incentive pay for volunteers ended June 6. The IRS, which confirmed the ending of the incentive pay, started asking for volunteers to come back to offices in late April.
Chad Hooper, the national president of the Professional Managers Association, which represents agency managers, told Law360 that according to notices his group received in April, the incentive pay was supposed to last for at least two pay periods, or four weeks.
"PMA supports the commissioner's efforts to compensate volunteers and thanks his staff for working diligently to find ways to do so given our very challenging budget environment," said Hooper, also an IRS employee in Philadelphia. "We in PMA understand that the incentive is no longer necessary as the agency implements its phased reopening for staff with nonportable duties."
All of the IRS' service centers had closed as a result of shelter-in-place orders because of the pandemic.
Recalled agency workers in Kentucky, Texas and Utah started returning to worksites June 1, and IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig told employees in a memo that agency facilities in Georgia, Tennessee, Michigan and Missouri will begin reopening June 15. Rettig's email also said operations in Puerto Rico, Ohio, Indiana, California and Oregon will start reopening June 29 and that facilities coming back online include key processing centers, notice print facilities and call center operations.
According to an earlier NTEU statement, Rettig's reopening plan includes a return processing center in Fresno, California, that is scheduled to close in 2021. As a result of the pandemic, the first period in which workers there could volunteer to take early retirement or a buyout that had been scheduled for March and April was postponed, the union said. The union also said it persuaded the agency to agree to two 60-day periods for workers to take early retirements or buyouts, with the first scheduled for July 15 to Sept. 15, and the second from next Feb. 16 to April 16.
A March report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration noted five specialized submission processing programs were previously conducted only in Fresno but will be moved to centers in Kansas City, Missouri, and Ogden, Utah.
Tasks those five programs are responsible for include processing of Form 8300, Report of Cash Payments Over $10,000 Received In a Trade or Business, and of Form 3949-A, Information Referral, which is received in connection with the IRS Whistleblower Program, according to the report.
Besides acknowledging the ending of the voluntary workers' incentive pay, the IRS confirmed the union's statement about the new periods for taking buyouts or early retirements in Fresno but declined to comment further.
--Editing by Vincent Sherry.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
