The gap between the Ruling Class and its faithful servants, versus the citizens of a dwindling American private sector, grows ever wider. Who knows which outrage will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and triggers a widespread citizen revolt against their corrupt and arrogant government?

How about the Internal Revenue Service paying millions of dollars in bonuses to employees with serious disciplinary problems… including employees who didn’t pay their taxes?

The Associated Press reports:

The Internal Revenue Service has paid more than $2.8 million in bonuses to employees with recent disciplinary problems, including $1 million to workers who owed back taxes, a government investigator said Tuesday. More than 2,800 workers got bonuses despite facing a disciplinary action in the previous year, including 1,150 who owed back taxes, said a report by J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. The bonuses were awarded from October 2010 through December 2012. George’s report said the bonus program doesn’t violate federal regulations, but it’s inconsistent with the IRS mission to enforce tax laws. “These awards are designed to recognize and reward IRS employees for a job well done, and that is appropriate, because the IRS should encourage good performance,” George said. “However, while not prohibited, providing awards to employees who have been disciplined for failing to pay federal taxes appears to create a conflict with the IRS’s charge of ensuring the integrity of the system of tax administration.”

Gee, ya think?

Other examples of misconduct by workers getting bonuses included misusing government credit cards for travel, drug use, violent threats and fraudulently claiming unemployment benefits. The IRS said it has developed a new policy linking conduct and performance bonuses for executives and senior level employees. “Even without a formal policy in place over the past four years, the IRS has not issued awards to any executives that were subject to a disciplinary action,” the IRS said in a statement. “We are also considering a similar policy for the entire IRS workforce, which would be subject to negotiations with the National Treasury Employees Union.”

Further evidence, if any were needed, that public employee unions are absurd and should be abolished immediately. They’re an organized conspiracy by government employees and politicians to loot taxpayers. As you can see from this report, it’s been working quite well.

The IRS had about 100,000 workers during the period under review. In the 2011 budget year, more than 70,000 IRS workers got cash bonuses totaling $92 million, the report said. In the 2012 budget year, nearly 68,000 workers got cash bonuses totaling $86 million. The report said the IRS considers prior conduct before awarding permanent pay increases. “However, IRS officials stated that the IRS generally does not consider conduct issues when administering other types of awards,” the report said.

And that makes sense because…? It’s amazing how much of our decrepit Big Government apparatus is literally impossible to justify to any sane adult human being. But that’s one of the perks of running an arrogant, aristocratic super-State: it no longer has to explain itself to the peons. Where do we go to vote the executives who authorized these bonuses out of office? What referendum can we sign to abolish the National Treasury Employees Union?

If all that doesn’t make your blood boil enough, the AP notes that IRS actually has a better record of tax law compliance from its employees than most other federal agencies. Treasury’s delinquency rate is 1.1 percent; the overall federal rate is 3.2 percent. Both of those rates are better than the 8.2 percent delinquency of the general public, which of course is (for the time being) much larger and more diverse than the federal government, generally less well-compensated, treated rather sternly for its tax delinquencies, and not charged with enforcing the very tax laws it is violating. It has been a long-standing complaint that tax issues are pursued by the IRS under a “guilty until proven innocent” model that applies to no other infraction. That makes it even more annoying to see people in the Washington orbit – federal employees, high-rolling representatives, and courtiers with the right political connections – skating by with delinquent amounts far larger than what middle-class taxpayers get hounded for.

And to give IRS employees bonuses when they’re delinquent on their taxes? It’s the sort of news guaranteed to nourish resentment against imperial Washington, and perhaps useful evidence for the case that the existing tax system is corrupt beyond repair. After all, another way to look at this story is to marvel that 1,150 employees of the Internal Revenue Service couldn’t manage to pay their taxes correctly, even though the agency thinks they were such outstanding workers that they deserved performance bonuses.