The new acting IRS commissioner pledged Thursday to work to safeguard citizens' private information and tax dollars and ensure that the agency acts impartially as it looks to move forward after a bruising few weeks.
Inside the Beltway, perhaps no event this week captured more attention than the ongoing Internal Revenue Service scandal, which both political parties have been quick to highlight as an example of government overreach.
Three days of hearings have shown that IRS scrutiny of conservative organizations extended beyond a few rogue employees in Cincinnati, that the agency staged its announcement of the bad news to try to limit the damage, and that the White House knew more, and knew it earlier, than it first admitted.
Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Neal S. Wolin said Wednesday his department had no hand in the IRS' targeting of conservative groups from 2010 to 2012.
You know you are a serious societal pestilence when even politicians can kick you around. Which is why the Senate Finance Committee called Steven Miller, former acting IRS commissioner, to testify about the agency's scheme targeting conservatives for tax punishment.
Democratic lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee said Tuesday the IRS, while engaging in "unacceptable" targeting of conservative groups, may have been set up for failure by campaign finance law ambiguities that allowed tax-exempt groups to engage in partisan politics without disclosing their donors.
The man who led the Internal Revenue Service when it was inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups' applications for tax-exempt status said Tuesday that he intentionally kept himself in the dark about those kinds of decisions because he thought, as a political appointee, he should keep his distance.
The White House counsel’s office knew that a Treasury Department inspector general’s report about the IRS targeting conservative groups had been completed in April — weeks before the matter became public.
A Texas group dedicated to combatting voter fraud applied for tax-exempt status in 2010 and has suffered three years of delays, been through four different IRS agents, undergone six FBI inquiries and submitted thousands of pages of documentation — and it still hasn't been approved.
