More Privatization or Fleecing the Taxpayers for Right Win Fun and Profit

The Internal Revenue Service paid a contractor $188,000 to provide one person to do clerical work over 11 months.

The contract was included as one example of financial waste in a government report Thursday on the tax agency's involvement in a new program ordered by President Bush in 2004 to develop more secure ID cards for federal workers.

The Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration said the IRS also needlessly spent almost $2 million on a computer security system that the tax agency doesn't plan using at this time.

The IRS was responsible for developing and implementing the program for providing more secure identification cards to some 150,000 employees at the Treasury Department. The projected cost of the Treasury program was put at $421 million over 14 years.

To provide one person for a clerical support job updating contact lists, assigning and tracking equipment and processing trip reports, the contractor was paid $128 an hour.

Auditors for the inspector general's office were told by IRS program managers that the work could have been done by an employee with a ranking of GS-7, eligible for a starting salary of around $38,000 plus benefits. The contractor and the temporary worker it provided were not identified.

Of the $30 million the IRS has committed so far for the project, about $3.5 million was spent on acquisitions that should have been avoided, the report said.

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