Two Congressmen have some concerns, and they want IRS Commissioner John Koskinen removed. Ron DeSantis (R, FL), House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security Chairman, and Jim Jordan (R, OH), Subcommittee on Health Care, Benefits and Administrative Rules Chairman, laid out their case in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. RTWT, but here are the highlights.
- Failure to inform Congress. Koskinen concealed—during repeated sworn testimony—from Congress for four months his knowledge that the IRS that it had “lost” vast amounts of Lois Lerner’s (of “I didn’t do it” infamy) emails.
- False testimony before Congress. One example: of the more than 1,000 computer backup tapes discovered by the IRS Inspector General, approximately 700 were available with their contents intact. Koskinen testified he had “confirmed” that all of the tapes were unrecoverable. Worse, those 700 intact backup tapes were found within 15 days of Koskinen’s informing Congress that they were not recoverable.
- Failure to correct the record. After his false statements to Congress under oath, Koskinen refused to amend them when given the opportunity at a public hearing earlier this year.
- Failure to reform the IRS to protect First Amendment rights. Koskinen still hasn’t acted on President Barack Obama’s May 2013 promise to “put in place new safeguards to make sure this kind of behavior cannot happen again.”
It’s not just Koskinen who needs to be fired—not allowed to retire, not allowed to resign, fired—though. IRS personnel cannot be trusted down to the worker bee accountants who do the actual work of checking tax returns. The breadth of IRS crimes—worthy of a RICO case, were it a private enterprise—renders the entire agency worthless. And that’s to the detriment of those worker bees.