Being a Manager at the IRS: A Little Bit of Everything
Our members at the Professional Managers Association (PMA) managers spend their days ensuring frontline employees understand and comply with all tax laws at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Managers at the IRS are vital to ensuring tax laws are administered fairly and with integrity. Congress assigns new missions to IRS employees while taxpayers expect better service, forcing IRS managers to juggle competing priorities with limited resources and report their issues, concerns, and trends to their next-level managers and executives.
In field offices across the country, IRS managers serve as the midpoint between policy objectives and execution of those objectives by frontline employees. As mission objectives come from Congress to political appointees to senior executives to managers, IRS managers must articulate and communicate assignments, projects, milestones, deadlines, and timeframes to frontline employees.
IRS managers work with their teams to ensure taxpayer interactions result in top quality service and correct and complete responses. IRS managers are also responsible for motivating the workforce and fostering an accountable environment to ensure a positive, consistent environment for their teams.
Although management is usually viewed as strictly administrative in nature, most IRS managers are technical experts, so their daily work involves reviewing employee actions and recommending correction where needed. For example, a skilled frontline manager in the Wage & Investment Division may assist in responding to taxpayer inquiries for advice on a variety of tax law and procedural questions. This manager then coaches their team so they can respond appropriately to similar issues.
IRS managers must be proactive decisionmakers and have strong conflict resolution skills. As first-level supervisors, many IRS managers are responsible for assigning, directing, and reviewing the work of lower-level employees. IRS managers also serve as their employees’ first point-of-contact for any and all concerns. They review leave requests, document conduct issues, correct IT issues, authorize travel expenses, hear union grievances, process payroll, and negotiate reasonable accommodations.
IRS managers have firsthand knowledge of the experience of frontline employees. The IRS regularly replenishes its management ranks with high performing employees through a variety of leadership development programs. This knowledge makes managers uniquely equipped to facilitate the growth and development of their teams. IRS managers assist their team members in identifying potential training and coaching opportunities as part of their career learning plans and leadership succession plans.
IRS managers are liaisons to senior executives. Managers monitor status and progress of work and make day-to-day (sometimes hour-to-hour) adjustments in accordance with established priorities. Managers distribute workloads among their staff to ensure efficient and timely completion. At the same time, IRS managers gather information for their senior leadership team to inform high-level decision-making. Managers are also responsible for identifying process improvement opportunities and recommending corrective action to enhance the IRS’s ability to accomplish its mission.
Managers must estimate the time and resources needed to complete tasks and report any constraints to senior managers and executives. Managers act as the central hub for multiple IRS workflows and their day-to-day work is necessary to ensure deadlines and goals are established and met. Managers must manage expectations of those above them by providing a clear-eyed assessment of resource needs and operational reality.
For decades, Congress routinely expanded the scope of the IRS while decreasing its size and resource levels. This places a unique burden on managers to figure out how to do more with less. Because of severe resource constraints, more and more managers are working 60+ hours per week and then bringing work home on weekends to keep the IRS functioning. While this is a troubling trajectory PMA is working tirelessly to reverse, IRS managers continually rise to the occasion to make the impossible possible.
This column, written by the Professional Managers Association (PMA), is part of the FEDforum, an initiative to unite voices across the federal community. The FEDforum is a space for federal employee groups to share their organizations’ initiatives and activities with the FEDmanager audience.
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