Awards update - IRS Blows it AGAIN

From Colleen Kelley: As some of you have heard by now, IRS has decided to delay issuing these awards in this pay period due to the many, many errors that chapter leaders brought to our attention within hours of seeing the data management gave us. The latest management decision is to issue them in pay period 19, which would have the money in the pay checks that go out October 11. Of course, I would not rely on that too heavily. Based on the analysis chapters did and what the national staff did afterwards, we believe there were several errors made in the production of the recent data by management. However, management still seems to think that there was only one system error and when it is corrected, everything will fall into place. Frankly, I doubt that very much.

Aside from alerting our members that the awards money they expected to be in their accounts next week will not be there, I also ask that you remind them that NTEU has told management from the beginning of the current system that the agency would never be able to administer the system correctly. So far, we have been proven correct every year since the system was implemented. This morning as Buggs was telling us what they have been able to learn about what management did and how soon he hoped to get it corrected, I took the opportunity to remind him that we never had significant problems under the old system where awards were based on local union-management agreements. I also told him that once management is ready to enter into a fair set of ground rules we will do everything we can to redesign the system so that management can not only administer it, but so that employees know in advance what they need to do to get an award.

Based on what we know so far, had management paid awards based on the current data, entire chapters would not have received a cent, hundreds of employees would have received duplicate awards and been liable for repaying them, and probably thousands would have received the wrong amount due to being in the wrong pool or would not have received an award to which they are entitled.

I will keep you updated on developments on this important issue.

Please let employees know about the change in the payment date of awards under NPAA, and of the reason why --- IRS errors that were identified by NTEU chapters.

Latest on Awards!

Awards update - IRS Messes it up as usual! This message is from Colleen Kelley: This is a followup to my emails late last week about the problems with the awards data provided by the IRS. We pulled the NPAA 07 data off the web site because chapters were finding so many errors with it. In a perfect world, all we should have to do with the data file the IRS sends us is break it into separate files for chapters. Unfortunately, we have never been so lucky under the award system IRS insisted we put in place in 2002. So far, we have found many of the normal errors indicating that not everyone was paid correctly, but also that the data on entire chapters is missing, many employees are labeled as being in one division when other data provided by the IRS has them in another division, the pools cannot be reconstructed, etc. When management insisted in 2002 that we replace the local awards system with a national program, we told them they would not be able to run it correctly. However, even I expected that after three years they would finally get it down right. They now have a five-year record of being unable to avoid even the huge mistakes. So, let me just end by passing on that there is a “high-level” meeting in AWSS tomorrow to try to figure out what happened. I will let you know what we learn from that.

Colleen M. Kelley
National President