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Saturday, April 30, 2016

The IRS Scandal, Day 1087

IRS Logo 2Washington Post, Inside Republicans’ Backup Plan to Punish the IRS Chief:

Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has been on a campaign since last October to impeach — literally — the tax collector.

But the Utah Republican has found little appetite among House leaders to call for a hearing, much less a vote to remove John Koskinen as head of the beleaguered Internal Revenue Service. Instead, Chaffetz says he is in conversations with his GOP colleagues about a vote on the lesser but still harsh charge of a censure.

“My foremost goal is impeachment and I’m not letting go of it,” Chaffetz said in an interview. “But if censure is the right precursor while we go through the process of educating our members, I have a [censure] bill drafted and ready to go.”

Chaffetz and his fellow Republicans have a slew of grievances against Koskinen’s management of the tax agency he took over in 2013, and last week the House passed six anti-I.R.S. bills by party-line votes to mark Tax Day.

But the effort to remove Koskinen stems from a scandal that preceded him — the IRS’s treatment of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. And since his five-year term ends in November 2017, the GOP effort to oust him could drag on beyond the Obama presidency.

Chaffetz says Koskinen should be impeached for violating the public trust and lying to Congress as it investigated the IRS’s singling out of conservative groups for scrutiny. The congressman has accused the commissioner of erasing back-up computer files containing thousands of e-mails written by Lois Lerner, the central IRS official in the scandal. Koskinen has told lawmakers his staff turned over all e-mails that were relevant to the investigation, and when some were found to be missing, said they were unrecoverable. ...

A censure resolution, rare in Congress’s modern history and far more common against lawmakers than government officials, would be a formal rebuke that states the House’s lack of confidence in Koskinen and calls on President Obama to fire him. It would fall short of outright impeachment, with no real consequence other than the announcement of the vote itself and a good measure of humiliation.

Democrats dismissed both efforts as wasteful partisanship. “Nobody who has examined this issue has identified any evidence of political targeting — not the Justice Department, not the Republican Inspector General of the IRS, and not even the Oversight Committee,” Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) the panel’s ranking member, said in a statement. “Republicans have wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars chasing false political conspiracy theories.” ...

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), when asked about the impeachment effort earlier this month, said “the IRS is not being led well” and “misled Americans” but stopped well short of backing Koskinen’s ouster. “What I think we need to do is win an election … get better people in these agencies and reform the tax code so we’re not harassing the average taxpayer with a tax code they can’t even understand,” Ryan said.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/04/the-irs-scandal-day-1087.html

IRS News, IRS Scandal, Tax | Permalink

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