The Internal Revenue Service is encountering difficulties attracting new employees in a jobs market that presents intense competition for workers, The Washington Post reports.
IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told Congress last month that the agency needs an additional 52,000 workers over the next six years to deal with its aging workforce. As part of that hiring drive, the IRS campus in Ogden, Utah, recently hosted a job fair in the hopes of filling about 700 openings, according to acting field director for submission processing Scott Wallace.
"It's a lot of empty seats, isn't it?" Wallace said during a tour of the campus, the Post reports. "Literally I don't have enough people to fill them. These are blue-collar, 16- and 17-dollar-an-hour jobs."
The Covid-19 pandemic caused the agency to shut down its offices and move to remote working, and various factors, from retirements, lack of childcare, and concerns about getting sick, caused the IRS to shed workers during this time.
"With all the unknowns, it made a lot of people nervous," Brett Bemenderfer, a program manager who works in submission processing, told the newspaper. "The pay for some of our positions comes in below the poverty line, and then we bring them in and hand them a red pen and some don't find that too appealing."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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