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Washington, D.C.—The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) has won an important arbitration ruling in its lengthy and continuing challenge to an attempt by the Internal Revenue Service to impose arbitrary and unreasonable educational requirements on applicants for positions as IRS Revenue Agents.

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley sharply criticized the IRS’s effort to increase the number of college-level accounting credit hours required of RA applicants from 24 to 30 and impose five required areas of coursework as a “selective placement factor” for the position. She described the agency’s effort as “a move to impose unnecessary obstacles on internal candidates.”

“While NTEU fully supports the idea that employees must be skilled and qualified” for their positions, said President Kelley, “we believe the current educational requirements for Revenue Agents provide for that.”

Arbitrator Carlton Snow struck down both IRS rules as violations of federal law which place stringent requirements on agency imposition of minimum education requirements. By law, minimum education requirements can be imposed only if an agency shows that the duties of the position can only be performed by an individual who meets those requirements. He provided NTEU and the IRS with 90 days to negotiate an acceptable remedy to the agency’s violations.

Snow wrote in his decision that “clear and convincing evidence submitted by the parties establishes that the duties of a Revenue Agent can be and are being performed by individuals who have not completed the prescribed 30 hours of accounting and related courses.”

He added: “Most persuasive is the fact that there are thousands of current Revenue Agents who do not meet the ’30 hour’ requirement and, nonetheless, are successfully performing their duties.”

Another key NTEU argument was accepted by the arbitrator—namely, that the imposition by the agency of the five-course requirement was a separate violation of the NTEU-IRS contract. Snow determined that the parties had negotiated a high standard for imposing a selective placement factor such as the five-course rule. He noted in his decision that thousands of RAs perform their jobs successfully without one or more of the required courses.

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