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Boston, MA — The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is foolishly moving in the wrong direction in closing its Boston taxpayer call site—one of a series of steps the agency is taking to cut back on customer service, the leader of the union representing tens of thousands of IRS employees told a large rally of union members today.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) told more than 100 union members at the rally outside Boston’s John F. Kennedy Federal Building that the IRS decision to cut back sharply its customer service operations will not only hurt local taxpayers, it will backfire on the agency as well.

Under the IRS plan, 82 IRS employees at the Boston call site, many of them disabled, are slated to lose their jobs by the September 30 end of the current fiscal year. The rally was organized and conducted by NTEU Chapter 23, which represents some 800 IRS employees in Massachusetts, including those who work in the Boston call site. Chapter 23 is led by its president, Richard A. Costa.

“While there is a lot of talk in the IRS about collecting a greater share of the taxes that are due,” President Kelley said, “the inevitable impact of this kind of bad decision will be a decline in taxpayer compliance with a tax code that is becoming increasingly complex.”

Rather than close facilities like the Boston call site, she said, the IRS should be devoting substantial additional resources to customer service as a way to help taxpayers meet their obligations.

The Boston call site, whose 82 employees include at least 10 with a variety of severe physical disabilities, provides a wide range of services to taxpayers, including answering their wide-ranging tax questions.

It is one of three call sites slated for closing—the others are in Chicago and Houston—along with 68 walk-in Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs) across the country, including four in Massachusetts. The state’s TACs the IRS plans to close are in Pittsfield, Fitchburg, Quincy and Hyannis.

In addition to closing the three call sites and 68 TACs, the IRS has said it will reduce by 15 hours a week the amount of time that telephone help is available to taxpayers.

President Kelley was sharply critical of IRS efforts to force taxpayers to use the Internet to get the help they need. “The best way to provide meaningful help for taxpayers, especially lower-income men and women, the elderly and those for whom English is not their first language,” she said, “is through personal contact, and not by forcing them to an electronic medium where they might not be familiar with the technology—nor might not even have access to it.”

She called the IRS cutback decisions “significant steps backward” and she urged both the federal employees and members of the public to call to the attention of their elected federal officials the detrimental impact on taxpayers of the agency’s plans.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments, including some 98,000 in the IRS.