It was an okay work experience before COVID, but the pandemic has exposed ALL the IRS's problems and issues writ LARGE. First off, Tax Examiner was a seasonal job. That means dealing with the job and all it entailed for a few months out of the year with months off to recover. But since COVID, the job has been full time. It's obvious the building was not meant to be at this capacity for the entire 12 months. Things break down at an alarming rate, including us not having potable water for a few days because a main broke in our city's water system. The cafeteria is an overcharged disgraced. There was even a time when the ADA entrance was broken, and it took a week for them to find a solution which was just propping open the door. The management is abysmal. Most don't know how to do the job that the workers they supervise do. Most managers' job is passing paper up and down the chain of command. There is no planning ahead, but instead, a lot of disorganization and unplanned reactions to conditions that should and could have been planned for much earlier. Instead, there's much last-minute scrambling to implement half-baked (at best) "solutions" that usually do nothing but cause more confusion if not make the situation even worse and more disorganized. That confusion is due to the abysmal communication that is a part of being a worker at the IRS. As a worker, I was given bad information, wrong information but penalized for bad outcomes due to said information. The only thing that saved me many times was me having documented communications so they couldn't lie their way out. The workers have no idea how their workload will be from day-to-day. Workers find things out via rumor. Asking a manager is usually useless. Instead, managers, especially upper management, care more about gaining bonuses on the backs of the workers, demanding insane amounts of mandatory overtime on very short notice so that they can earn bonuses for reaching deadlines. Our service center's management is covered in grievances, individual and mass. They do not care about abusing the workers. They do not care about the contract they signed with the union. They break that contract on the daily basis. Little to nothing is done about it. Management does not fear the NTEU because they know the union is toothless and is afraid of them. This isn't even touching on the racism, sexism, misogynoir and queerphobia that never gets checked. Managers play favorites and discriminate on the regular. If you're a worker who sticks up for themselves, you are public enemy number one. Workers are fleeing the agency. People are even taking positions with other agencies at lower pay and grades simply to escape the IRS.
