Thursday, December 20, 2007

Our Tax Dollars at Work

IRS paid one contractor $188,000 to provide 11 months worth of clerical work: "The Internal Revenue Service paid a contractor $188,000 to provide one person to do clerical work over 11 months.

The contract was included as one example of financial waste in a government report Thursday on the tax agency's involvement in a new program ordered by President Bush in 2004 to develop more secure ID cards for federal workers.

The Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration said the IRS also needlessly spent almost $2 million on a computer security system that the tax agency doesn't plan using at this time."

4 comments:

Cap'n Bob said...

I work for the Air Force. Our new ID cards have computer chips in them. They are used to get onto our government computers and at the main gate they are scanned to check whether we're terrorists or scofflaws with unpaid tickets. I also use mine to scrape the ice off windshields.

Unknown said...

Too bad you didn't get that clerical job.

Brent McKee said...

Set aside the value or lack of value of the cards. $188,000 over 11 months is 17,090 a month. Figuring four 5-day work weeks (or 20 working days - it would probably be a little closer to 25 days) and an 8 hour day, that would amount to about $21.36 an hour. I don't know, what does the IRS pay a union member an hour for clerical work? What you are seeing though is proof that the conservative insistence that the private sector can do things cheaper ain't necessarily so.

Brent McKee said...

Oops my calculations were significantly off - it's closer to $85 an hour on a 25 day month. That is a bit much. That's the thing about big numbers though. Saying someone got paid $85 an hour for 11 months has a lot more impact than saying they got paid $188,000 for 11 months work.