August 9, 2002

GILES FILES

By
Duncan Giles
President
NTEU Chapter 49

On this and that….With the new contract in place for a little over a month, so far things are beginning to emerge.  

The first is the general air of confusion on how to proceed with some contract provisions.  Here are just a few unanswered questions….How many stewards is a Chapter allowed to have?  May management designate where they are placed?  Which management official should hear a grievance and at what step of the grievance procedure?

The other early trend is that we will not be able to solve as many issues informally as we have in the past.  Management wanted to streamline the grievance process at the bargaining table (which is good) but it’s a double-edged sword.  It means that where we used to go in and try to correct something with a casual conversation, that same issue almost has to go to a formal process now.  I’ll conservatively estimate that grievance filings will go up at least 200% this year.  I don’t think this is what managers had in mind to “reduce their burden.”

I foresee a few things coming down the pike by the end of the year.  I think there will be some realignment of groups in SB/SE.  To what degree no one knows yet, but at this point I believe it will mostly be the same folks working for a different manager.  

In LMSB it will be interesting to see how the realignment shakes out.  Are they done?  I don’t think so.  Where they go to fine tune this even more than already has been done is anyone’s guess.

At the Call Site, I do think we will end up with W&I in Kansas City, even though national NTEU hasn’t even been briefed yet (much less negotiated) nationally or locally.

For W&I in the Indiana PODs, we will end up with either 4 or 5 Territory Managers.  

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again.  I love the new IRS.

That’s it for this time.   

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CALL SITE LEADS
& EVALUATIONS

It has been brought to our attention that some IRS call sites are using monitoring reports from Leads as part of employees’ annual performance appraisals (evaluations).  We at Chapter 49 would like to take a moment and explain our position on this issue.

Leads perform a very important function.  Their jobs are designed to ease the work load of team managers.  Leads may be called upon to perform monitoring.  Monitoring reports from leads should be information a team manager may use to identify problem areas to address in the team, or identify a team employee that may be having a problem performing in a given area of the job.  

Monitoring reports from Leads should not be used by team managers when preparing performance appraisals.  That usually  includes monitoring reports from Leads while serving as an acting manager.  Employees’ job evaluations should be based on feedback provided by that employee’s manager, not feedback from the team’s Lead.   

If any Indianapolis Call Site employee has any indication that monitoring reports from Leads have been used in preparing an annual performance appraisal, we would recommend that you contact a Call Site union steward.
      

NOT A MEMBER OF NTEU?
CONTACT A CHAPTER 49
STEWARD TODAY!

EXAM CLASSIFICATION:
CASE STUDY ON
THE “NEW IRS”

The creation of the “new IRS” has had one very clear consequence—the process of examining tax returns was slowed down considerably.  Leaders of NTEU Chapters throughout the nation asked their members examining returns how the process could be improved.  The clear answer to the question centered on the process of classifying returns to be examined.  The scoring programs are badly out of date and will remain out of date for at least a few more years.  As a result, a number of examined returns are no-changed.  

NTEU wanted to help improve this process so our examiners would have more productive work to do.  NTEU members who understand this process said there is only one solution to this problem…...the Service needs to return to a system allowing experienced local examiners to classify (select) returns to be examined in their local area.

NTEU raised this issue at the SB/SE Divisional Partnership Council.  SB/SE leaders Joe Kehoe and Dale Hart promptly rejected the idea, claiming Commissioner Rossotti had ordered that Revenue Agents should have nothing to do with classifying cases that may come back to their own geographical area.  When NTEU followed up, we discovered the Commissioner never made any such statement.  So we once again raised the issue at the partnership council meeting, and the management would not consider our suggestions.

It came as a big surprise to NTEU National President Colleen Kelley when she discovered a few months later that IRS was about to change its policy on classifying returns, but gave credit to a management group for spearheading the change.  In other words, the same proposal IRS would not discuss with us was implemented as a result of a proposal from an internal management committee.  Here’s what President Kelley had to say about all this…

I find it quite sad that when the division’s own employees overwhelmingly ask for a change, they are ignored.  But, when others do so, the change is promptly adopted.  Management is looking to everyone but their own employees for advice as to how to improve operations.  The insights of outside advisory groups, consultants like Booze-Allen, and others continue to dominate the decision-making.  In this case, if management had made the change a year ago, we would have had eight more months of productive work to do.

Colleen does say that the new person in charge pf SB/SE Compliance, Martha Sullivan, has been “open-minded and responsive” in dealing with NTEU.              

BUREACRATS

What distinguishes America is our system's ability to consistently expose, punish, regulate and ultimately reform  (corporate business) excesses — better than any other. How often do you hear about such problems being exposed in Mexico or Argentina, Russia or China? They may have all the hardware of capitalism, but they don't have all the software — namely, an uncorrupted bureaucracy to manage the regulatory agencies, licensing offices, property laws and commercial courts.

Indeed, what foreigners envy us most for is precisely the city Mr. Bush loves to bash: Washington. That is, they envy us for our alphabet soup of regulatory agencies: the SEC., the Federal Reserve, the FAA., the FDA, the FBI, the EPA., the IRS, the INS. Do you know what a luxury it is to be able to start a business or get a license without having to pay off some official?

Sure, we have our bad apples, but most of our bureaucrats are pretty decent. In fact, our federal bureaucrats are to capitalism what the New York Police and Fire Departments were to 9/11 — the unsung guardians of America's civic religion, the religion that says if you work hard and play by the rules, you'll get rewarded and you won't get ripped off.

Which is why I find Mr. Bush's constant denigrating of "the bureaucracy" so offensive. After his own E.P.A. issued a report in June linking fossil-fuel use to global warming, Mr. Bush dismissed the study by saying that he "read the report put out by the bureaucracy," as if that explained why it couldn't be credible.

               —Thomas Friedman, New York Times Columnist
               excerpted from his July 28, 2002 column