Some IRS employees are abusing their agency calling cards but the IRS doesn’t really know to what extent and lacks sufficient controls to identify waste, fraud and abuse, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has said.
The IRS issued about 34,000 telephone calling cards as of February 2008. About $8.4 million had been charged on them in the preceding three years, but the IRS has not validated its inventory since 2006 and control weaknesses identified in fiscal 2004 have gone unaddressed, the IG said.
It said nearly $60,000 in improper international calls had been billed to one card in particular from June 2007 to June 2008.
According to TIGTA, card charges are not routinely reviewed and a comprehensive inventory is not completed annually.
The agency brought online a Telecommunications Asset Tool in 2003 to improve cost controls, but in 2004 TIGTA said had not been effectively implemented and critical information was not being captured by the system. Further, it said an effective managerial review process for telephone calling card use had not been implemented.
Corrections that were supposed to have been made to the TAT system since them have not been made. From October 2005 through August 2008, the IRS successfully reviewed telephone calling card charges for potential waste, fraud, or abuse only once, according to TIGTA report 2009-10-050.