Letters

Your Editor's Notebook for December made extensive reference to your recurring theme since 1989 of a hollow government, yet your feature article on the IRS, "Pay Your Taxes, Please"(December), made no reference to this possibility.

How sad that you have extensively detailed other federal agency shortfalls in money, staff and equipment, yet no mention was made of an IRS that ended fiscal 1988 with 123,000 employees and an IRS that ended fiscal 1997 with 97,000 employees (source: Commissioner's Annual Report and IRS Data Book). How frustrating to try to deliver quality customer service and equitable tax enforcement "by applying the tax law with equity and fairness to all" (emphasis added) when the number of your colleagues has dwindled as the workload has grown.

Perhaps Government Executive will see fit to take another look at the IRS. After all, isn't an underfunded, understaffed tax agency just as dangerous to our way of life as a hollow military? If the IRS customer service representative isn't there to answer every phone call, if the IRS collector isn't there to pursue every delinquent taxpayer, if the IRS auditor isn't there to regularly identify underreported taxes, and if the IRS criminal investigator isn't there to ferret out tax fraud, how will we as a people fund our military and the many other things that make this such a great country?

George L. Deller
IRS Taxpayer Advocate
New York

Misfire on Hiring

I was surprised by Francis Pandolfi's December column ("To Market, To Market," Viewpoint). His assertion that he could save the Forest Service $320,000 just through his superior leadership techniques shows an arrogance I would not want in any federal agency.

Pandolfi made some good points in his column. But he is too quick to blame federal managers and not quick enough to blame Congress. Congress often saddles government workers with special requirements that benefit a narrow constituency to the detriment of efficiency and common sense.

Finally, his "intolerable situations" involving the preference given to veterans shows an attitude that is disturbing. I am not a veteran, and a veteran recently bumped me from my position. I understand his concerns. But these preferences are an obligation that the country has promised to veterans.

John Minker
Former Electrical Section Chief
McClellan Air Force Base, Calif.

Appraisal Pitfalls

I agree with Paul Light that a performance appraisal system that attempts to rank employees is often a meaningless task (The Public Service, October). Given this type of system, the pass/fail option is a superior alternative because less time is wasted in achieving the same result.

In order to have a truly effective system, employee performance needs to be aligned with organizational performance as outlined by the Government Performance and Results Act. Further, designing a new system without an understanding of variation, systems thinking, psychology and theory of knowledge-principles W. Edwards Deming referred to as profound knowledge-will tend to lead to the same set of problems.

Tim Clark
Defense Department

Employees need feedback. They need to know areas where they can improve and where they are doing an outstanding job. However, the current pass/fail system used by the Defense Contract Management Command does not do that.
The important part of the performance appraisal process is to have a job description that accurately describes the tasks of the position and performance standards that are accurately tied into that job description. Tell us what you want and we can give it to you!

Wanda Certo
Chief Steward, NFFE Local 73
Defense Contract Management Command
Cleveland