The IRS will increase the paychecks of about 1,000 computer programmers and offer other incentives to stem a rising tide of employee departures that could hobble its ability to deal with the year 2000 problem.
The programmers in GS-334 series jobs will get an extra 10 percent "retention allowance" for the rest of this fiscal year and, "should conditions warrant," will continue to get the extra money in 1999, agency officials said. To be eligible, the programmers must work in the IRS national office and have received at least a fully successful rating in their last annual performance appraisal.
Under a plan negotiated with the National Treasury Employees Union, the IRS also will promote 131 GS-334 employees to higher-ranking jobs at the GS-13, -14 and -15 levels. Commissioner Charles O. Rossotti revealed the retention incentives Thursday at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on the IRS budget.
Rossotti said that in the private sector, programmers' salaries have been rising about 12 percent to 15 percent each year recently. Meanwhile, federal salaries are going up about 3 percent a year. "As a result, we've been losing the people," he told the Treasury, Postal and General Government Subcommittee. An IRS spokesman later said attrition among the agency's information systems employees doubled between fiscal 1995 and 1997, going from 3.9 percent to 7.9 percent.
Although the retention allowances will not bring IRS information systems salaries up to private-sector levels, Rossotti told the subcommittee the programmers were heartened by the agency's actions. The actions let the employees know "they weren't going to be left with a sinking ship on this year 2000 problem," the commissioner said.
Rossotti said getting IRS systems ready to continue processing tax returns in the year 2000 has become an all-consuming goal for the agency. Little other work has been done this year to improve IRS systems, he said, adding that year 2000 readiness is also one of the agency's top fiscal 1999 priorities.
If the systems are not ready for the date change, the effects would be "potentially disastrous," he said, but he expressed "a fairly high degree of confidence" that the agency will get the job done in time. However, programmers who are familiar with the 90,000 separate software applications at the agency are not readily replaceable, he said.
Besides retention allowances and promotions, IRS will offer its programmers job security assurances, a commitment to fill vacant information systems (IS) jobs and a $3 million increase in this year's IS training budget.
Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the loss of competent IRS programmers points up the need to increase salaries across government. "We need to pay comparable wages," he said. "We can't not pay people and then expect high performance and increased productivity."
In the course of negotiating the programmer incentives, the IRS and NTEU also resolved an earlier dispute about the payment of awards to headquarters employees for fiscal 1996-1998.
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