After large-scale layoffs and uncertainty earlier this year, the Internal Revenue Service in Ogden is on a hiring spree.
The agency wants to fill 300 seasonal positions at an Ogden hiring event Sept. 23 and 24. It also invited back some employees who have been on paid leave since accepting the government’s offer of deferred resignation, known as the Fork in the Road, earlier this year.
That reversal has fostered some resentment among workers who stayed behind.
“That's kind of a morale breaker right there,” said Robert Lawrence, president of the Ogden chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union. “Because not only were those people off for several months, they got paid to do nothing, and they got to accrue leave and sick leave and annual leave.”
The U.S. Department of the Treasury, the bulk of whose workforce is in the IRS, was the largest employer in Weber County in 2023, according to the Utah Department of Workforce Services. Between 7,000 and 9,999 workers were on its rolls.
Lawrence estimates more than 1,000 Ogden employees took the deferred resignation offer, including many who held institutional knowledge. That left the remaining employees working extra hard, in true Beehive State fashion, he said.
“We’re a machine here, and there's a bunch of different cogs in this machine, and everybody is working extremely hard and working long hours and working overtime just to get the job done.”
Probationary employees who had initially been terminated were placed on administrative leave in March as challenges to their firings worked their way through the courts. They were asked to return in May.
In Ogden, Lawrence said hundreds of probationary employees were fired and then asked to return, though they couldn’t get back to work right away.
“They sat at home for several months doing nothing because there was no place to put them as a result of that Return to Office order,” he said, noting probationary workers have returned to the office in the past two months.
But the mood inside Ogden’s IRS offices is not all negative, Lawrence said. Many of his colleagues “are happy to have jobs, happy to be working.”
Those who took paid leave through the deferred resignation program worried that the Department of Government Efficiency would eventually fire them with no pay, he said. That includes Leandra Howry, who had worked there less than a year.
Some of her coworkers quit, Howry recalled. Anxiety was high in the office on the day she thought would be her last.
“I didn't put a bra on. I didn't really get ready for work. I just kind of rolled out of bed and went in because I'm like, ‘They're going to send us all home, you know, I'm done.’”
Howry was not dismissed. But she did take the government up on its offer of paid leave through September, rather than staying on through uncertainty. Her last day at the IRS was May 15, since she was required to stay through tax season. She found a new job at a tow truck company within weeks.
“It was a better choice to work a second job and have that income and then, you know, pay off some debts and do a couple of things that I've been wanting to do now,” she said.
Recently, after hearing that the IRS was hiring again, Howry applied for a job with the agency but decided to take a role with the Utah Department of Workforce Services. She said she feels blessed that things worked out well. Plus, the stability that attracted her to government work in the first place is back.
“At least with the state job, I feel more secure. And the reasons that I was going to stay with the IRS, I'm having here,” like a pension, she said.
Still, she knows things could have turned out differently.
“I just felt like a lot of parts lined up in my favor by pure dumb luck,” she said.
Macy Lipkin is a Report for America corps member who reports for KUER in northern Utah.
