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Washington, D.C: -- A Supreme Court argument scheduled for tomorrow could have farreaching affects on the rights of federal employees to have union representatives present during interviews that involve potential disciplinary action,

President Robert M. Tobias of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said the case, in which NTEU has filed an amicus brief, "has the potential to strip from federal employees rights specifically granted to them in the federal labor?management statute."

The question at issue, Tobias said, is whether or not investigators from an Office of Inspector General function as "representatives of an agency," within the meaning of the 1978 Federal Service Labor?Management Relations Act.

The issue is particularly important to NTEU, which represents more than 98,000 IRS employees, in light of last year's IRS Restructuring and Reform Act, which transferred not just the duties but most of the personnel of the IRS Inspection Service to a new entity??the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

Tobias said "the federal government has never challenged the status of IRS's Inspection Service as a representative of that agency." To do so now, he said, "would strike a serious blow at the heart of employee rights not just at the IRS but throughout the federal workplace."

Although the matter is still in dispute, IRS has stated that employees interviewed by TIGTA investigators do not have the right to union representation??a right established in the private sector by court decision and subsequently extended to federal workers under federal labor law.

The 1998 Restructuring and Reform Act's history, Tobias said, shows that Congress put a special focus on the work of the Inspection Service, and while it discovered a variety of flaws in its operations, there was "no evidence that affording employees representational rights during Inspection examinations was one of those flaws."

He added: "The record is clear that Congress's primary goal in transferring functions from Inspection to TIGTA was to ensure greater accountability of IRS managers" and not to repeal by implication existing and hard?won employee rights." An adverse Supreme Court decision in this case would have just that impact, he said.

The case at the Supreme Court involves an appeal by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its Office of Inspector General of a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. That federal appeals court found in favor of the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) and the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) that NASA's Office of Inspector General was indeed a representative of the agency within the meaning of the federal labor statute.