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Washington, D.C.-The leader of the union representing more than 98,000 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees today said she welcomes the commitment of the Treasury Department's tax inspector general "to avoid both the appearance and the reality of quotas" in investigating allegations of misconduct against IRS employees.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said she obtained the commitment from David Williams, Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), in a meeting she sought immediately after learning from media reports that an internal Williams memo to TIGTA field offices had appeared to spell out specific numbers of such cases to be investigated over the next year.

"There should not be artificial numbers for investigations to be done," Kelley said. "It would be a very unhealthy work environment to announce there will be `x' number of investigations, whether they are needed or not."

The Williams memo suggested a goal of 5,000 investigations of alleged IRS misconduct next year-a number that would result in the investigation of about one of every 28 agency employees, and, even more striking, one in every nine front-line tax administration employees.

The NTEU leader said she and Williams "had a very productive discussion" of this issue. "Mr. Williams is acutely aware of the damage that a perception of quotas can do throughout the IRS workplace," Kelley said, "and I welcome his stated commitment to work with NTEU to help monitor and keep open the lines of communication on the policies and procedures to be followed" as TIGTA performs its assigned tasks.

TIGTA was established as part of the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 (RRA), the thrust of which was not only to help modernize the IRS but to ensure that both taxpayers and employees are treated in appropriate ways. Virtually all of the powers and personnel of what had been the IRS Inspection Service were transferred to TIGTA.

Senate hearings that led to enactment of RRA, and media reports on the IRS during that period, focused largely on the use of enforcement statistics as a measure of how employees were performing their jobs.

Under the IRS reform plan now in motion-and in which NTEU and its members are playing a central role-the use of such statistics, or any other so-called `quota'-has been replaced by a balanced set of measures which seek to identify business results, along with customer and employee satisfaction as the proper benchmarks for agency and employee performance.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 155,000 employees in 26 agencies and departments.