US President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder applaud during the National Peace Officers Memorial Service on the West Front of the US Capitol, in Washington DC, yesterday. The annual event honours law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty the previous year.
WASHINGTON: The FBI’s criminal investigation of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) could include potential civil rights violations, false statements and potential violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in some partisan political activities, Attorney General Eric Holder said yesterday.
Holder, testifying to the House Judiciary Committee, was asked what criminal charges could be pursued against IRS employees or officials. Holder announced on Tuesday that the Justice Department was the investigating the IRS after the agency acknowledged that agents had singled out conservative groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.
“I can assure you and the American people that we will take a dispassionate view of this,” Holder said. “This will not be about parties, this will not be about ideological persuasions. Anybody who has broken the law will be held accountable.”
Holder also says it will take time to determine if there was criminal wrongdoing. As the investigation widened, House Speaker John Boehner told reporters he had this question: “Who’s going to jail over this scandal?”
“There are laws in place to prevent this type of abuse. Someone made a conscious decision to harass and to hold up these requests for tax exempt status,” Boehner said. “I think we need to know who they are and whether they violated the law. Clearly someone violated the law.”
Yesterday’s hearing was the first of several in Congress that will focus on the issue. The House oversight committee announced that it will hold a hearing on May 22, featuring Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS division that oversees tax exempt organisations, and former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, whose five-year term ended in November.
The House Ways and Means Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow, featuring the acting IRS commissioner, Steven Miller, and the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, J Russell George.
Three congressional committees are investigating the IRS for singling out tea party and other conservative groups during the 2010 congressional elections and the 2012 presidential election. But Holder’s announcement would take the matter to another level if investigators are able to prove that laws were broken.
Ineffective management at the IRS allowed agents to improperly target tea party groups for more than 18 months, said a report released Tuesday by George’s office.
The report said that while their applications for tax exempt status languished, tea party groups were asked a host of inappropriate questions, including: Who are your donors? What are the political affiliations of officers? What issues are important to the organisation, and what are your positions on those issues? Will any officers in the group run for public office? Where do you work?
The report lays much of the blame on IRS supervisors in Washington who oversaw a group of specialists in Cincinnati who screened applications for tax exempt status.
“The report’s findings are intolerable and inexcusable,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “The federal government must conduct itself in a way that’s worthy of the public’s trust, and that’s especially true for the IRS. The IRS must apply the law in a fair and impartial way, and its employees must act with utmost integrity. This report shows that some of its employees failed that test.”
Agencies
