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Washington, D.C.-There is no stronger evidence of the positive potential for federal sector labor-management partnership than the role employees are playing in the most ambitious modernization and restructuring ever of the massive Internal Revenue Service, the leader of the union representing IRS employees said today.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents more than 98,000 IRS employees, told a Senate subcommittee that "employee input has been instrumental" in changes at the IRS in response to the congressional mandate expressed in the 1998 IRS Restructuring and Reform Act (RRA). "Pre-decisional employee involvement is

proving to be key" to improving IRS performance, she said.

Kelley, who leads the nation's largest independent union of federal employees, told the panel "it is clear" that IRS employees want to have their voices heard, as do other employees in their respective agencies. She pointed to the more than 2,400 NTEU members employed by the IRS who volunteered for some 150 positions on 11 different joint design teams established to examine specific aspects of work at the agency as a means of implementing RRA mandates.

She also noted that IRS Commissioner Charles O. Rossotti, with whom she appeared at today's hearing, has publicly recognized that any meaningful reform of the agency "had to include the active participation of his chief asset-his employees."

At the same time, the NTEU president reminded Congress that its actions play an important role in delivering quality services to taxpayers. For example, she noted that each tax law change requires the IRS to reprogram its computers, retrain employees, update forms and redouble customer service efforts designed to explain these changes to the public.

"This fact makes it all the more important that IRS and NTEU work together to insure that employees have the tools they need to perform their jobs," she said.

The NTEU president said her union supports partnership throughout the government because it is "an avenue that permits us to work together toward a shared goal" of more efficient and effective service on behalf of the American people.

She said there is a "direct link" between employee job satisfaction and satisfied customers and that steps to include front-line federal employees early in the decision-making process "have a positive effect on the bottom line." Partnership is the most important factor in that, she said.

In testimony before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Kelley focused on labor-management cooperation and the importance of employee involvement in providing quality governmental services. NTEU represents some 155,000 employees in 24 agencies and departments.

She said it has been shown "time and again" that "when federal agencies make a conscious decision to involve rank and file employees in the decision-making process, everyone wins-the agency, the employees, and, most of all, the agencies' customers-the taxpayers."

She told members of the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, which is examining quality management initiatives in the federal workplace, that NTEU is working hard to improve partnership programs in every agency where it represents employees.