As an Enrolled Agent myself, I must respond to John Dundon’s recent Blog entry.  The dwindling of resources of only 2.7% over a 2 year period is hardly a catastrophe for any governmental entity. I worked in local government for almost 15 years and KNOW without a doubt that such a minor loss of resources could be managed with little or no difficulty.  However, government bureaucrats are like little children who always want MORE, MORE, MORE!

No doubt there are issues especially with a workforce that has a large number of employees nearing retirement.  One thing I have noticed over the years when attending the IRS Tax Forums, is the younger employees are far more efficient than the Senior Managers and non-executives just building up their retirement accounts.

The fact that the e-Service program has been seriously curtailed, supposedly because of lack of use, is demonstrative of the agency’s management making a bone-headed decision. One must suspect that the real reason the service has been curtailed is because the Treasury Employees Union was strongly opposed to a renewal of the private contract.  Regardless of the usage level, there is no way the manual processing of POA’s and Account Resolution are even close to being as productive as the electronic method.

One of the biggest problems for all of government is the political argument made that you cannot focus on incidental expenses but rather you should look at the whole picture.  This is just bureaucratic double-talk.  I call this the “paper clip, rubber band and pen argument.”  No doubt that IRS employees, as do employees in every unit of government and yes, even business, take home their share of these items.  On its surface, no one is going to question the cost of these lost resources.  However, the aggregate total is no doubt a substantial cost.  Now just find every instance of something in the agency that might fit this scenario.  [i.e. why do they need to mail 2 copies of every notice?]

When I was in Graduate School for my Masters of Public Administration, zero-based budgeting was the hot topic. The concept was great on paper, however, in practice just not feasible.  Nevertheless, one of the casualties of its failure was to retain the mentality of incremental budgeting.

I dare say, regardless of the governmental agency and its apparent necessity, the issue of “declining resources,” is and will remain a continuing issue. Instead of trying to figure out a way to find a politically satisfactory continuing resolution, maybe it is simply time for us to seriously consider defunding more than just Obama care or any other government program we don’t like.