| A court ordered that the probationary workers be asked to return to work in May; however, less than half were ultimately reinstated. The rest resigned, took a deferred resignation, or were placed on administrative leave.
The firings added stress to an agency already under pressure, as revealed by more than a year of reporting by ICIJ on the IRS's challenges in investigating and prosecuting tax crimes.
The TIGTA report, published in August, confirmed that the IRS did not follow its own protocols in firing so many workers, but also highlighted internal resistance to the orders. Traci DiMartini, the human capital officer for the IRS at the time, refused to sign the termination notices (which were sent unsigned) and later said in testimony for a lawsuit that the action was unprecedented.
"In all my decades of human resource management for the federal government, I had never before received a directive such as this one," she said in a sworn statement in March. DiMartini was placed on administrative leave shortly after the termination notices were sent. Read more.
FOREIGN INTERFERENCE WATCHDOG
Canada will appoint its first foreign interference commissioner and introduce a registry of foreign agents as part of a package of reforms aimed at fighting transnational repression, a government minister confirmed. Lawmakers had called for government action following ICIJ and CBC News' China Targets investigation that revealed how Beijing was intimidating and harassing dissidents living in Canada.
WORK WITH US
We're hiring! ICIJ is seeking a qualified machine learning engineer to join our technology team and help us design, build and ship machine learning-related tasks and pipelines for processing large amounts of documents through our open-source software Datashare.
ICIJ ON THE ROAD
Join ICIJ's head of data and research, Delphine Reuter, at the European Data and Computational Journalism Conference on Sept. 9 in Athens, Greece, for a panel discussion on using machine learning passport detection technology in offshore financial investigations. Plus, in November, ICIJ's deputy head of data and research, Karrie Kehoe, will share tips on navigating cross-border corporate data at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Thanks for reading!
Hamish Boland-Rudder
ICIJ's head of digital and product
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