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Washington, D.C.—The head of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) today said she strongly supports legislation introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D-Mass.) that would grant competitive service status to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) estate and gift tax attorneys who face the prospect of effectively being forced from federal service.

The IRS has said it will cut its workforce of estate and gift tax attorneys from 345 to 157 despite the fact they are the most productive tax law enforcement employees in the agency—generating, by the IRS’s own figures—$2,200 for the Treasury for each hour worked, and despite the existence of a tax gap estimated by the IRS at $345 billion, and growing.

“NTEU strongly disagrees with the IRS decision to get rid of half of this talented and productive workforce,” NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said, adding, “Given the size of the multi-billion-dollar tax gap and the amount of money estate and gift tax attorneys generate for the Treasury, it doesn’t make any sense for the IRS to reduce the staff in this function.”

The Lynch bill, H.R 6292, is a companion measure to one introduced earlier this week by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a bill that also drew NTEU’s immediate and strong support.

By granting estate and gift tax attorneys competitive service status, the legislation impacting these highly-skilled and productive IRS employees would allow them to transfer to other open positions in the federal government for which they are qualified.

At present, they are in the ‘excepted service,’ meaning they are not covered by regular civil service hiring procedures. If their positions are eliminated by the IRS, they would be treated as outside job seekers when pursuing other federal positions, despite their obvious value to the government and to taxpayers.

"By all accounts, the IRS is under-staffed,” said Lynch, a member of the Financial Services Committee, “but, for reasons unknown, the IRS has chosen to cut some of its most talented tax lawyers—men and women who were responsible for holding the wealthiest Americans accountable for their tax obligations. What makes even less sense is that we're now making it difficult for these gifted public servants to continue to work for the federal government. We should be doing everything in our power to attract, and retain, the best and brightest minds to public service-this common sense legislation would allow us to do just that."

President Kelley welcomed the legislative action by both Rep. Lynch and Sen. Kennedy, noting that while the bills don’t address the underlying problem of the mistaken IRS policy, they would ensure “a soft landing” for those affected by the proposed IRS cuts.

Along with NTEU’s criticisms of the plan, a number of members of Congress have questioned the wisdom of cutting from the IRS workforce those who review the tax returns of the wealthiest estates in our society. Several congressional requests have been made to the IRS for the data the agency used in making this decision—including the IRS’s allocation of audit resources for various categories of estates by dollar amounts.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 federal workers in 30 agencies and departments, including 94,000 in the IRS.