If you make a mistake as an employee in the private sector, there is usually a price to pay. Perhaps your annual review won’t go so well. Maybe you’ll lose a raise or miss a promotion. You might even lose your job.
But the private sector is not like the fairy tale world of government employment.
Case in point: It recently came to light that more than 1,100 IRS employees received bonus checks after not paying taxes.
According to a new report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, more than 2,800 IRS employees facing disciplinary actions received more than $2.8 million in monetary bonuses.
In addition to the millions in bonuses, those IRS employees also received 27,000 worth of additional time-off bonuses and more than 175 quality step increases (which allows employees to receive promotions faster, according to the Office of Personnel Management). The report, written by J. Russell George, looked at a period between October 1, 2010 and December 31, 2012.
Of those employees with disciplinary actions during the time period, more than 1,100 of them with “substantiated Federal tax compliance problems” received over $1 million in cash awards, $250,000 in time-off awards and 69 quality step increase awards within the same year the IRS proved the employees hadn’t paid their taxes.
Again we see that laws are applied to different classes of people in different ways. If you are part of the government or “The Elite,” you are exempt from the law. But God help you if you’re an ordinary middle class citizen.
As George Orwell quipped in his famous book Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” That certainly seems to be the case here.
