WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama yesterday chose a White House budget official to lead the beleaguered Internal Revenue Service (IRS) temporarily and vowed to ensure that the tax-collection agency will not single out any more groups based on their political beliefs.
Danny Werfel, the controller of the Office of Management and Budget who served as a point man on the controversial automatic spending cuts known as “sequestration”, will start in the new post on May 22.
Obama is racing to get out in front of a scandal that threatens to derail his second-term agenda as Republicans and conservative groups accuse his administration of using the levers of power to persecute political enemies.
“I think we’re going to be able to figure out exactly what happened, who was involved, what went wrong, and we’re going to be able to implement steps to fix it,” Obama said. “It is just simply unacceptable for there to even be a hint of partisanship or ideology when it comes to the application of our tax laws,” he added.
Obama has said he did not know about the actions of IRS employees who targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny as they sought tax-exempt status before the news became public last week.
Obama has faced a series of recent setbacks that could threaten his ability to pursue priorities like immigration reform and a budget deal. Republicans have hammered the administration’s handling of a deadly militant attack last year on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, and the Justice Department has been criticised for seizing phone records of journalists from the Associated Press as part of a criminal probe into intelligence leaks.
The IRS scandal has prompted at least three congressional probes, as well as a criminal investigation by the Justice Department. Obama fired the agency’s acting director on Wednesday after an internal IRS watchdog found poor management led to an “inappropriate” focus on conservative groups.
Werfel has a track record of coolly responding to harsh questions from lawmakers. He testified multiple times this year about the damaging budget cuts that kicked in after Congress and the White House failed to reach a larger deficit reduction deal.
“The American people deserve to have the utmost confidence and trust in their government, and as we work to get to the bottom of what happened and restore confidence in the IRS, Danny has the experience and management ability necessary to lead the agency at this important time,” Obama said.
In the Senate, Republicans called on the IRS’s internal watchdog to investigate whether the agency had leaked the donor list of the National Organization for Marriage, a conservative group fighting gay-marriage initiatives, to a rival group.
Reuters
