Apparently, despite what most of us think, IRS employees are a lot like you and me. This report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that agency employees regularly violate official e-mail usage guidelines. 

Specifically, the Treasury Inspector's office discovered inappropriate e-mail messages in 74 percent of the office e-mailboxes it reviewed. The bulk of the questionable missives: chain letters, jokes and non-work related pictures.

Sound familiar?

The report got me to thinking about what jokes IRS employees might share. Roth & Company went beyond speculation and came up with a potential e-mail joke that might be making the rounds of IRS in-boxes:

Why did the chicken cross the road? Who cares, if he didn't have adequate documentation of the trip's business purpose under Section 274!

So there we have it. Proof that IRS workers goof off by spamming their family and friends, just like the rest of us.

Since we've all sent or received e-mail at work that our bosses would not approve of, maybe we should cut IRS workers a tiny bit of slack. Or at least hope they will share some of their better jokes with the rest of us!

Not so funny: In addition to innocuous jokes and the like, the Tax Inspector General found 20 percent of the IRS' nontax e-mails contained offensive material and another 4 percent included sexually oriented content.

Remember, IRS workers: The rest of us just want good, really funny, jokes! None of that other stuff, OK.

The problems with these extraneous mailings are obvious, but the report states them just to make sure everyone is clear.

"Offensive and inappropriate content … can damage employee relationships and lead to adverse personnel actions or potential lawsuits. When forwarded to outside recipients, these messages could also invite high-profile media attention, damaging the IRS' reputation."

That ship in that last sentence probably has already sailed from most of our personal perception ports, but it had to be pointed out.

More to the real purpose of the investigation, off-topic e-mail and attachments often pose serious security risks. They could contain malicious software that could destroy computer data or allow unauthorized access to sensitive IRS material, including taxpayer information.

An Oregon Department of Revenue employee found out the hard way the truth of this warning. In this case, it wasn't a questionable e-mail, but rather some decidedly questionable at-work Web surfing that led to the same disastrous results.

During a visit to a porn site, an Oregon tax department employee -- or, as he was referred to when the incident was announced earlier this summer, an "ex-employee" -- downloaded a contaminated (in every sense of the word) file and ended up compromising the personal data of up to 2,200 Oregon taxpayers.

That's right. A porn site. At work. In the Oregon state tax office.

Maybe he was doing some research on a proposed federal tax of online sex sites. Nah, I really didn't think so either.

I just hope the picture he just had to have was really, really worth it!

So let this be a lesson to us all. Surf safely, especially at work!

Thanks to TaxProf for the tips.