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- Crowding at IRS offices in Ogden due to a return-to-office mandate is easing as officials allow some employees to return to working from home.
- What's more, the General Services Administration has removed a key IRS facility in Ogden from a list of federal buildings marked for disposal.
- The IRS is Weber County's top employer with some 7,500 workers.
OGDEN — A mandate for IRS workers to return to their offices has caused crowding at the agency's facilities in Ogden, but the crunch is easing, somewhat, thanks to a softening of the order.
"They are slowly but surely allowing people to work from home. It's still way overcrowded," said Robert Lawrence, president of the Ogden area chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union, Local 67. The local branch represents many of the 7,500 or so Ogden-area IRS workers.
The U.S. General Services Administration, meantime, has reduced a prior list of 440 federal buildings across the country that were earmarked for "disposal" to just eight, with three earmarked Utah facilities, including an IRS facility in Ogden, no longer on the list. The IRS Service Center at 1160 W. 12th St. is one of the agency's key facilities in Ogden with nearly 500,000 square feet of space.
"We're going to chalk that up to some good news," Lawrence said.
Even with the 12th Street facility open, the Feb. 28 Department of the Treasury order that all IRS employees work out of IRS offices effective March 10 had caused major overcrowding. Many of the Ogden-area workers for the IRS, Weber County's key employer, are "teleworkers," splitting time from working at home and an agency office.
"So we have people teleworking in hallways at the IRS in conference rooms. We have them everywhere. A lot of these people can't go to the same desk every day. It's quite the mess," Lawrence told KSL NewsRadio last week.
That chaos is easing, Lawrence said Monday, thanks to the decision to backtrack on the Department of Treasury telework order. Nevertheless, the transition to the prior normal is not yet complete. "They need to let everybody who was working on telework before this return-to-office order ... to go back to teleworking," he said.
Ogden is in a unique situation, Lawrence said, because many jobs at other IRS locations elsewhere in the country were moved to Utah as a result of consolidation efforts years ago. Instead of opening up more office space in Ogden, though, IRS officials allowed many of them to telework, "and that's what we've been doing, and they've been doing a great job," Lawrence said.
President Donald Trump issued an order on Jan. 20, the first day of his second term, calling on all department heads to end remote working "as soon as practicable." The Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS, subsequently issued a memo on Feb. 28 outlining the process for the tax-collection agency and setting the March 10 deadline.
"The whole problem is that Treasury is calling the shots, and the IRS isn't. The IRS would never have let this happen, but Treasury, per DOGE, is making these calls, and Treasury doesn't know what's going on out here in Ogden. They think there's a space for everybody, and there's not," Lawrence said. DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, is the nongovernmental entity created by Trump and headed by businessman Elon Musk. It is tasked with reducing waste and inefficiency in the U.S. government.
Similarly, Lawrence disparaged the preliminary General Services announcement of March 4 that the Ogden IRS Service Center was on the list of 440 federal buildings to be disposed of through sale or other means. Also on that initial list but removed in the updated version published on Friday were the Wallace F. Bennett Federal Building at 125 State St. in Salt Lake City and the St. George Federal Building at 196 E. Tabernacle St.
"That's a perfect example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing and some people trying to run the government who have no idea how to run the government," he said.
In a statement to KSL.com, the General Services Administration didn't say what exactly factored in the whittling of the list of 440 buildings to eight but offered the broad rationale for reducing the federal government's portfolio of buildings.
The agency "is focused on rightsizing the federal real estate portfolio to reduce the burden on the American taxpayer while also delivering space that enables its agency customers to achieve their missions," reads the statement. "Going forward, additional assets will be posted regularly."
In response to a list of frequently asked questions on the General Services Administration process, the agency said it opted to follow "a more incremental approach" in reducing the federal building inventory focused "on a shorter list of assets that have already been evaluated."
Meanwhile, news last week that the IRS will reinstate probationary employees who had been let go as part of the Trump administration's moves to scale back the federal workforce isn't necessarily the last word on the matter, Lawrence said. The initial moves had led to axing of 100 probationary workers in late February and worries that up to 1,000 in the Ogden area would be let go through May.
"I don't know what the administration of DOGE — I can't speak for those guys. I don't know what plans they have for them, if they're just going to lay them off again. The main layoff was to happen May 15; that was where we would lose thousands of people. I don't know if that's been put on hold," he said.
