The problem isn't OPM's DRP, it's the IRS

(Pardon some of the awkward wording. Some words trigger a "Please restate your post to adhere to our standards" message that blocks me from posting this.)

This will probably be a minority opinion on this board and possibly deleted but if you are willing to listen to a differing perspective on the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) you may understand the situation beyond just your own perspective. Understandably many of you are fighting against the upcoming reduction in force of the various gov agencies. Many of you are middle/late career government people, managers, or just people in positions that you enjoy and you look forward to many years of service. Your desire to resist is understandable and hopefully all who want to stay will keep their jobs.

However some of us are not in that position. Some of us quite frankly are stuck in low rung GS-5 starting positions that we hate but had to take. The position currently occupied by myself is the Customer Service Representative which is a fancy title that really just means we're the punching bag of the public answering phones. Imagine being on the telephone for 8 hours where the person on the line quite often berates and despises you. Some entitled brat that claimed her neighbor's kids to claim credits, or some guy who thinks he's slick claiming 50k in gas credits, neither of which has ever had a job in their life, talks down to you, even threatens your life as has happened to me. All while having to navigate through IDRS and 6-10 different programs cobbled together into some Frankenstein creature which no amount of training can prepare you for. Even the "pleasant" calls from people like the poor old widows who never did taxes before and their husbands recently passed are heart breaking as the money they need to make rent or buy medicine is stuck behind some -X freeze. Imagine being the 7th person telling some 92 year old widow "We can't do anything about your refund, please allow 30 more days." It's repetitive tedious Sisyphean work that makes you feel like some caged farm animal. One could write a book about just these types of experience that makes the job one of the worst.

So why take the job if it's so horrible? Necessity. Being responsible for a sick family member, the idea that one could work 4 out of 5 days from home made the job somewhat tolerable. The 1-1.5 hour drive one way in once a week into an office building that makes the set of Office Space look like a Google Campus was horrible enough. Hard to imagine 5 days a week with every cubicle packed and everyone screaming over each other. Suffering from anxiety just being on the phone for 8 hours straight is bad enough let alone having to do a all week like that. Most office jobs give you some time to breath or work in spurts. For a CSR every single second of your day is accounted for. One co-worker in the office showed me how he kept a little journal counting each minute of his day even his bathroom breaks or if he has to get up to talk to a manager about something because one time he was reprimanded so badly. Some of the managers are insufferable. They make their position their entire personality and use it as a way to peck at the people below them in ways that are plausibly deniable but unnecessarily knit picky. As a CSR you hardly get a moment to breath. Call after call, the 15 min breaks vanish in a blink and lunch in two. Everyone is stressed and looks physically unhealthy, myself included. You have people who suffer mentally there and eventually everyone gets to that point given enough time.

The day the "Fork" email came in was the happiest day at IRS for me. The job isn't worth the money but it felt like at least with this offer it would make up for everything. With 8 months paid, there would be enough time to find something else and finally put this behind me. Best sleep of the past few years was those few days after the first letter came out. But to my surprise my co-workers were furious. At the meeting the union people kept using scary buzzwords and talking about this was a trick, a scam, it was bait and switch. What was the trick? What were we being scammed out of? Baited? For what? "We have to fight the DRP!" Uh why? If you don't like the offer, you don't take the DRP deal. It's that simple. What was all this commotion and need to scare others and convince them also not to take it. If you love answering phones, more power to you. But for people like myself that were here because we had to be and we now had the option to leave, why were we made to feel like we were somehow traitors or stupid? And there was so much misinformation and claims that could be recognized as simply wrong with only the tiniest bit of reasoning.

• "Well you see they can only give you 80 hours of admin time and any more is illegal!" Wrong, it's 10 days total for investigations. The law says it doesn't apply to any other kind of admin leave.
• "Well if you take the deal, they will terminate your position and then you get nothing!" No, your position continues to exist until Sept 30th which you are paid through. You don't actually quit quit until then. You are essentially indistinguishable from your peers that do not take the deal except you are on admin leave.
• "Well what if congress doesn't pass the spending bill!" We're all in the same boat. We get furloughed all the same and get paid later. There doesn't need to be a special provision to pay people on admin leave.
• "Well those-who-shall-not-be-named-here will simply not pay you! They are waiting for you to reply with resign, then kick you out and not pay you!" The only way pay wouldn't come to us is if IRS did something to obstruct said pay.

All of these complaints rely on interpreting everything written in the least charitable most bad faith way. The only way this offer is "bad" or "doesn't work out" is if the agencies and the unions keep fighting against it. If OPM wants to give people a way out, why not instead of obstructing it, work to ensure the full terms offered are respected? Instead the unions are suing. Why? If you don't want the DRP simply keep working. Why do you care if others take it if it works for their lives? What is this culty behavior? Why yell about "hold the line don't resign" to everyone? Don't people understand that the more people who take the DRP the less chance those who wish to remain will get fired when the down sizing occurs?

Recently a big example of such obstruction reared its head with the IRS email that stated "critical filing season positions in Taxpayer Services, Information Technology and the Taxpayer Advocate Services are exempt from DRP until May 15, 2025." My junior co-worker that's been in the same position as me for only a year and a half smugly remarked and applauded "see OPM was always going to screw us over!"

How is something the IRS is doing the fault of OPM or even the administration? Why aren't unions doing their job and instead of suing against the DRP, fighting to ensure the terms are upheld? The letter said that some will be asked to work a bit past the date of them accepting the resignation in RARE cases. How is half of the IRS being exempt from the DRP until May 15th rare? And furthermore, if "nobody is even taking the agreement" as so many people are claiming, why is this even necessary? Only a tiny insignificant minority is taking the deal right? It's clear the IRS are going against the DRP letter by making half of the agency not exempt from the DRP until May 15th. It feels malicious and intentional so it can be said the offer wasn't authentic.

"But it IS filing season and tax payers need to call!"

95 out of 100 calls are going to be some variation of "gimme my money faster" or "why is this taking so long" before the processing time is even done. We're NOT necessary and half the IRS being kept to work regardless of whether they signed the DRP is NOT a "rare case." Hopefully someone at OPM sees this and looks into it.

Tax payers should just come in person because that's what they'd want most anyway. If the issue isn't important enough to get out of bed for, it's not important enough to bother anyone at IRS over. And those with specific medical conditions should instead have an IRS agent be able to go visit them. Get rid of most phone functions and implement this instead. Provide more self help resources. You'd cut down on so many needless interactions. But digressing here...

Wish people would just be objective and not react emotionally because they don't like the guy in charge of the country now so the offer can't possibly be good. So many people that were going to quit anyway suddenly got some weird agency nationalist fervor. One day they're half way out the door, next day they're gripping their stapler and screaming about loyalty til their dying breath in their cubicle with one foot on their desk like they're crossing the frozen Delaware. If for you the DRP isn't a good deal then simply don't take it. Nobody is forcing you to take the deal. Turn your cubicle into a mausoleum and stay forever, doesn't bother me. Just stop trying to make it harder for those of us who see this as an opportunity to escape. The DRP isn't for you and that's fine. It's for people like me. So let us have it.

And once again IRS this extension for us to work until May 15 is on YOU no matter how much media is trying to spin this that somehow this is the fault of someone else. Half of IRS still working is NOT a "rare exception."