Some of the IRS employees who took last year’s buyout added a little five-finger bonus to their departure, walking away with government laptops and smartphones they should have returned.
An inspector general said Thursday that most of the 22,000 workers who left did turn in their stuff. But nearly 600 devices were still missing as of April — a year after the departures began.
On the plus side, none of the devices were being used to get into the IRS network, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said.
Investigators said the IRS doesn’t put a timeline on when supplies must be turned in, nor does it have a method to charge ex-employees for the cost of the material.
“Therefore, there are no consequences if a departing employee fails to return their assets,” the inspector general said.
The buyouts — part of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency attempt to downsize the federal bureaucracy — were particularly popular at the IRS, which saw a large percentage of employees accept the offers.
Investigators said the 22,000 employees had more than 32,000 “assets” assigned to them.
Some 1,308 of those items were still outstanding as of November, when investigators first ran the list. They gave their findings to the IRS’ tech staff, which performed an inventory.
It turned out that some of the missing supplies had been turned in to managers, but those supervisors didn’t give them to the IT office until the inventory. In other cases, the IT staff failed to properly log devices’ return.
But as of April, 594 were still outstanding, totaling more than $270,000 worth of supplies.
Investigators said to the best of their knowledge, the IRS has not bothered to track down the former employees.
The IRS’ Computer Security Incident Response Center has declared the items “lost.” The inspector general said they should more properly be declared “stolen” at this point.
“The IRS cannot locate the items, and they have no evidence that the assets were returned by the employees. These assets place the IRS at risk of data loss as the hard drives of laptops and memories of smartphones have not been cleared and could contain sensitive taxpayer information,” the inspector general said.
The audit also found that some employees who were allowed to use their own devices hadn’t had their program access canceled when they departed.
That was a breach of protocol.
Still, none of those devices were used to regain access to IRS systems, the agency reported, and the devices’ access has been revoked.
IRS Chief Information Officer Kaschit Pandya, in the agency’s official response to the audit, acknowledged that the ability to force return of equipment was “limited.”
He said the agency will come up with new rules and timelines to get equipment back and will ask the inspector general to help out where “appropriate.”
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