Tax Administration

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) efforts to recruit college graduates for its enforcement staff, focusing on: (1) the quality of IRS enforcement recruits; (2) IRS management of its college recruitment program; and (3) IRS relationships with colleges and universities.

GAO found that: (1) the main obstacle that impeded IRS recruitment of quality enforcement staff was noncompetitive starting salaries; (2) although IRS increased its starting salaries in some high-cost geographical areas, they were still below its competitors' salaries; (3) IRS had no quantitative data to support its managers' generally positive views on the quality of enforcement recruits; (4) many managers cited the same evaluation factors, but used different standards to interpret them; (5) inadequate funding, insufficient staffing, and field office resistance impeded IRS progress in implementing its recruitment improvement projects; (6) IRS relied on duplicative, uncoordinated efforts at the local level, rather than addressing IRS-wide problems on a national scale; (7) the IRS Human Resources Division provided little recruitment guidance to the field offices, did not require reporting of field activities, and did not conduct recruitment program reviews; and (8) although IRS established a Campus Executive Program that targeted certain schools for special attention, many schools were not aware of the program or their status under it.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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