Fedweek

The House plans to vote this week on several bills targeting the IRS that have implications for its employees including: HR-3724, to require the parent Treasury Department to certify that all IRS employees are current on their own taxes; HR-1206, to ban rehiring employees who previously were fired for misconduct; and HR-4890, to ban all IRS employees from getting performance award payments until the agency implements a plan to bring customer service performance up to certain levels. The White House has opposed all of those bills, although it did not explicitly threaten to veto them, as it does in some similar statements on other bills it opposes. Meanwhile, the House Veteran Affairs Committee has held a hearing at which the VA’s response to its now two year old patient scheduling and care scandal was criticized once again, in particular for how few employees have been subject to disciplinary action. Also, the full House Appropriations Committee has passed a funding bill for the department that would bar the VA from paying performance awards to any senior executives, after rejecting a bid to restrict that policy only to those directly implicated in the patient scheduling scandal.