Scandal-Plagued IRS to Pay Out $70,000,000 in Employee Bonuses WITH YOUR MONEY!

Hello!!! Is there anybody thinking in this government? The national debt is nearing $17 trillion dollars, we desperately need our government to cut spending, the President and the Congress are still fighting about the sequester and the IRS wants to give 70 million of YOUR dollars out in employee bonuses.  Employee bonuses for what? Covering up the fact that the IRS was used as a political tool?

Sen. Chuck Grassley  has learned that the IRS is executing an agreement with the employees' union on Wednesday to pay the bonuses. The Senator claims the bonuses should be canceled under an April directive from the White House budget office.


No Senator, the bonuses should be cancelled because the federal government is drowning in red ink and because the IRS has had a rather bad year when you consider the brewing scandal regarding the targeting of tea party groups and the other scandal regarding $50,000,000 spent o conferences and really lousy Star Trek parodies.

When any company I have worked for doesn't have a stellar year there are no bonuses.  Heck if the IRS doesn't believe me they can check my tax returns (which they may be doing just because of what I write on these pages).

The order to pay the bonuses was written by Danny Werfel,  acting IRS commissioner. He gave the OK while he was still the controller for the White House Budget Office.

"The IRS always claims to be short on resources," Grassley said. "But it appears to have $70 million for union bonuses. And it appears to be making an extra effort to give the bonuses despite opportunities to renegotiate with the union and federal instruction to cease discretionary bonuses during sequestration."

The IRS said it is negotiating with the union over the matter but did not dispute Grassley's claim that the bonuses are imminent.

Office of Management and Budget "guidance directs that agencies should not pay discretionary monetary awards at this time, unless legally required," IRS spokeswoman Michelle Eldridge said in a statement. "IRS is under a legal obligation to comply with its collective bargaining agreement, which specifies the terms by which awards are paid to bargaining-unit employees."

Eldridge, however, would not say whether the IRS believes it is contractually obligated to pay the bonuses.

"In accordance with OMB guidance, the IRS is actively engaged with NTEU on these matters in recognition of our current budgetary constraints," Eldridge said.

Grassley disagrees:

"While the IRS may claim that these bonuses are legally required under the original bargaining unit agreement, that claim would allegedly be inaccurate," Grassley wrote in a letter to acting IRS Director Danny Werfel. "In fact, the original agreement allows for the re-appropriation of such award funding in the event of budgetary shortfall."

Come on people can you really be that thoughtless? I don't care if you blame Bush or Obama but the fact is that fewer people than ever are in the workplace. So many people are depressed about losing their jobs and not finding a new one or about being under-employed, that Congress should declare Prozac the national food of the United States (wait guys I was just kidding, don't start asking for free Prozac to be added to the Obamacare regulations).

This country is about to collapse under its own debt and the government is wracked with scandal and this Administration has the nerve to even consider giving bonuses? How do they sleep at night?