Paul L. Caron
Dean





Wednesday, June 3, 2015

The IRS Scandal, Day 755

IRS Logo 2The Hill, Watchdog: Lerner Report by End of Month:

A federal watchdog investigating the missing Lois Lerner emails said Tuesday he expects to give lawmakers a final report by the end of the month. 

J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, said at a Senate Finance hearing that his office conducted almost 150 interviews as it sought to track down the former IRS official's emails. ...

Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) told George that he hoped to have the inspector general’s report by the middle of this month.

George, while insisting his office would do his best, also stressed that he needed to be extra careful with an investigation this sensitive. He said the office still had to interview some people important to the case.

“As you can imagine, with each interview, that leads to more information that needs to be tracked down,” George told Hatch. “Given the nature of this matter, we need to be as thorough as possible, and we’re endeavoring to do just that.” ...

GOP lawmakers have said little so far about what was in those emails, though one Republican aide has said there appeared to be little new in the documents.

Hatch told reporters Tuesday that he believed the Finance Committee would be able to quickly wrap up its own bipartisan investigation into the IRS once it got the inspector general’s report.

“The entire delay has been we kept getting more and more emails, after they said that was it,” said Hatch, who had previously stated that he wanted to get his committee’s report out this month. “We’ve had to go through them all.”

Hatch and committee aides had previously said that the Finance report was all but done when the panel found out last year that the IRS couldn’t recover some of Lerner’s emails.

But Finance aides have declined to put out a timeline for when their report could be released, noting that committee investigators will have to square what the inspector general uncovered with their own findings.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/06/the-irs-1.html

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