75% Absentee Rate At Reopened IRS

     From the Washington Post (emphasis added):

The Internal Revenue Service had barely begun bringing its lowest-paid workers back to the office in late April when someone in the Philadelphia call center came down with a fever, forcing the third-floor staff to head home.

Within two days, an employee in the processing center in Kansas City, Mo., who routes paper checks for deposit was sick with coronavirus symptoms, too. Then the husband of a woman in accounts management in the Covington, Ky., office tested positive, leading managers to presume that she was infected.

The three service centers, among 10 campuses nationwide where the IRS is trying to reinstate 11,000 employees, had to partially close for a week for deep cleaning. ...

The tax behemoth that touches virtually every American has made the government’s most aggressive effort so far to recall its workforce. But like other federal agencies following President Trump’s order to reopen the country, the IRS is struggling to ensure the safety of its employees as it tries to chip away at a crushing backlog and serve the public. ...

As of Monday, about 3,000 customer-service and clerical workers had volunteered to return to the office, an absentee rate of almost 75 percent. ...