GOP: IRS kept worker because afraid of union

A senior GOP tax writer accused the IRS of failing to fire an employee who had shirked her job for a year because the agency was afraid of blowback from the staffer’s union.

{mosads}Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) said lawmakers had discovered that a staffer making at least six figures, and as much as $138,136, had filed timesheets indicating that she had been working on a special project.

In fact, the employee had “spent most of the last year doing nothing,” former IRS official Lois Lerner said in an email chain in 2011. IRS lawyers and human resources officers recommended firing the staffer, but Lerner and other senior officials instead decided to lower her performance score.

Boustany charged in a letter to the IRS commissioner, John Koskinen, that the staffer’s job was saved because the National Treasury Employees Union “protects underperforming employees.”

“No small business in America could keep its doors open if it paid its employees for doing nothing,” Boustany wrote to Koskinen.

“An employee that sought payment for work claimed, but never performed would be subject to severe disciplinary action, if not immediate termination.”

Lerner is currently the central figure in the controversy surrounding the IRS’s improper scrutiny of Tea Party groups.

An NTEU spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

Boustany and other Republicans have not been shy in making the case that too many IRS resources go toward union activities, especially when Koskinen and other senior agency officials say the IRS needs an increase in funding. The IRS spent more than $20 million and 500,000 work hours in fiscal 2013, Boustany said Wednesday.

In his letter, Boustany asks Koskinen how many times since 2009 that the IRS disciplined employees for getting paid for work that was never done.