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Washington, D.C.—The head of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said today the union strongly opposes the nomination of a Treasury Department executive as a so-called employee representative on the IRS Oversight Board and will work with the Senate Finance Committee to defeat the nomination.

“IRS employees deserve a meaningful voice on this vital public-private body,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley. “The clear language of the statute setting up the board refers to the appointment of either a rank-and-file IRS employee or employee representative. The president’s nominee—Donald V. Hammond, Treasury Fiscal Assistant Secretary—is neither, and should not be confirmed for this position.”

The nine-member Oversight Board, which was established in the 1998 IRS Restructuring and Reform Act (RRA), plays an important role in reviewing IRS operations and policies, and in making recommendations, including on the agency’s budget, for improvements.

In a letter to President Bush last week, President Kelley said the then-proposed nomination of Hammond “would be terribly disrespectful” to IRS employees and would strip the board of an “authentic employee voice” in its deliberations.

“This is yet another example of the disdain this administration has for the views of frontline federal employees,” Kelley said.

The NTEU leader emphasized again the reasoning behind the provision calling for an employee representative on the Oversight Board—namely, the existence of concerns raised during discussions about RRA that Congress wasn’t getting a true picture of IRS operations, and that providing a high-level forum and meaningful voice for frontline IRS employees was critical to obtaining that information.

Those concerns, Kelley told the president, “not only continue today, they are as relevant today” as they were in 1998.

The NTEU president said she intends to press the union’s opposition to the Hammond nomination with the Senate Finance Committee.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 federal workers in 30 agencies and departments, including 90,000 in the IRS.