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Washington, D.C.— President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) today sharply criticized the use of what she called a “shoddy and misleading” report to Internal Revenue Service executives alleging that IRS employees are abusing agency-provided telecommunications equipment to access the Internet in inappropriate ways.

The report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) was quoted at a recent congressional hearing and claims that IRS employees take time away from their duties and spend it on the Internet.

The NTEU president said the union “does not condone inappropriate use of the Internet,” and said she has offered to join with IRS Commissioner Charles O. Rossotti in sending a joint memo to all IRS employees, emphasizing agency rules governing use of the Internet and urging employees to follow those rules.

But the TIGTA report leaves the impression that the majority of IRS employees are spending the majority of their time on inappropriate Internet use and that is categorically not true, Kelley said. For one thing, she said, the total Internet usage by the 16.3 percent of IRS employees who have such access amounted to one hour per week per person.

“Even if you agreed with TIGTA’s analysis of what constitutes non-business use, which we do not, it would amount to less than five minutes per person per day,” Kelley said, “hardly an extraordinary situation in today’s wired workplace.’

The NTEU president said the TIGTA report, for example, assumes that all electronic mail outside of the IRS is non-business related. Increasingly, she said, IRS employees, in the course of their work, are in electronic communication with outside locations, an operating procedure apparently ignored by the TIGTA analysis.

While the report, and news accounts of it, highlighted accesses to sexually explicit web sites, it appears that TIGTA unearthed just one individual making such highly inappropriate contact.

Kelley quoted the IRS management response to a draft of the TIGTA report:

“I was very disturbed that you uncovered one case in which an employee had accessed a sexually explicit web site,” [emphasis added]. Management’s Response to Draft Report by Deputy Commissioner Bob Wenzel, Nov. 8, 2000.

“While one case is clearly one too many,” Kelley said, “it does not reflect the vast majority of conscientious, good people working at the IRS.”

The work that IRS employees do is “hard enough,” Kelley said, “and inaccurate and misleading reports like this one put another roadblock in their continuing efforts to provide the kind of service the American people want and deserve.”

TIGTA was created by the 1998 IRS Restructuring and Reform Act (RRA) and has the same responsibilities, and many of the same employees, as the former IRS Inspection Service, which was charged with overseeing compliance with IRS and other government rules.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 25 agencies and departments, including some 97,000 in the IRS.