This is the worst working environment I have ever had the misfortune to experience. It is a model of inefficiency, mismanagement and government waste. Nepotism runs rampant. "Diversity" is a religious pursuit. If you are a white non-Latino male, consider yourself a heretic (except for top management maybe). Incentives are non-existent. There is a reward and punishment system in place - without the rewards. The major task is data entry as the IRS compiles massive records on everyone. To do this, you work with command-based 1970 software. The promise of more robust methods never materializes because the government doesn't put the talent where it could make a meaningful contribution, even though the talent is there. The mass of low level workers enter the data while frontline management spends countless hours making out meaningless reports for upper management. Every minute must be accounted for but its all a sham and everyone knows it. Most work is make-work. Internal forms are generated by one department to keep another department busy to keep yet another department busy. Sometimes the forms end up back where they came from. Then the forms are stored in giant warehouses where they rot for the X number of years or so before being trashed. The most commonly heard reason for doing any task is "job security." This catch phrase can be heard ringing throughout the many buildings housing thousands of employees who understand that Job 1 is creating busy work to reduce the national unemployment rate. And don't expect your skills and abilities to be appreciated or used. You will be trained to be a cog. No thinking permitted. Creativity and easily implemented efficiency suggestions will only get you in trouble. Before seeing it for myself, there is no way I would have ever realized how wasteful and inefficient our federal government really is. If you try to change it, you will be punished. It's not the low-level workers who are overpaid but they are the ones who will suffer from government belt-tightening. So sad but all true. I could go on and on. I worked many jobs there and it was always the same with a few variations. I held out hope that I would find a niche where I could utilize my talents and make a meaningful contribution through public service. I'm finally convinced that such a place does not exist within this agency.
