The Trial Balance is CFO.com’s weekly preview of stories, stats and events to help you prepare.
Part 1 — Probationary IRS workers are going back to work
About 7,000 probationary IRS workers who were terminated in February are now reinstated and set to return to work on April 14, according to an email sent to employees last week.
The workers were let go as part of the Trump administration’s effort to reduce the federal workforce. Though probationary employees have fewer protections than permanent ones, two federal judges ruled in March that the terminations were unlawful. As a result, the IRS reinstated the affected employees but placed them on administrative leave, keeping them on the payroll without assigning duties.
Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California criticized the move, arguing it fell short of the injunction’s goal to resume normal services at the IRS. In response, the agency said the employees will be fully reinstated by April 14, just a day before the April 15 tax filing deadline. The decision stems from a bench order issued by Alsup in American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO et al. v. United States Office of Personnel Management.
“The court has read news reports that, in at least one agency, probationary employees are being rehired but then placed on administrative leave en masse,” the order said. “This is not allowed by the preliminary injunction, for it would not restore the services the preliminary injunction intends to restore.”
Employees of the IRS who fall into this category have spoken publicly, citing confusion and outdated systems as reasons the agency requires a large labor force. Speaking on The Accounting Podcast last month, IRS revenue agent Jeff Johnston — one of the 7,000 probationary employees laid off and now reinstated — said the hardest part of the job wasn’t the work itself but completing it within the IRS’s archaic systems.
“It is a really hard job to learn only because the systems you have to use within the IRS are just [antiquated],” Johnston said. “It would be like going back to an IBM XT. One of the main systems that [the IRS uses] to get taxpayer information [still] has a green screen.”
He added the initial hiring, which was brought on by funds that were promised in the Inflation Reduction Act, involved onboarding and training some heavily credentialed people. He said those in his onboarding process had “CFO level experience” along with master’s degrees in accounting and taxation. “They had all of these experienced people, they trained them for six months to a year, and then just threw it away,” Johntson said. “Nobody has done the cost on that. Can you imagine the cost to recruit and train those people?”
Part 2 — This week
Here’s a list of important market events slated for the week ahead.
Monday, April 7
- Consumer credit, Feb.
Tuesday, April 8
- NFIB optimism index, March
Wednesday, April 9
Thursday, April 10
- Initial jobless claims, week of April 5
- Consumer price index, March
- Core CPI, March
Friday, April 11
- Producer price index, March
- Core PPI, March
- Consumer sentiment (preliminary), April
Part 3 — A Q&A with Workday CFO Zane Rowe on change
This week, CFO.com will publish a Q&A with Workday CFO Zane Rowe. Rowe has served as a CFO in large multinational corporations for nearly 20 years. He talks about what elements of the CFO role have changed and stayed the same, how he has created a flexible finance function that embraces change, how to implement change in legacy organizations and more.
