By Kim Dixon and Matt Spetalnick
WASHINGTON, May 15 (Reuters) – As Republican lawmakers
stepped up their calls for top Internal Revenue Service
officials to resign, President Barack Obama planned to meet with
Treasury officials on Wednesday to discuss how to respond to the
growing uproar over the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups
for extra scrutiny.
A day after a Treasury Department inspector general’s report
that described how poor management led to an “inappropriate”
focus on claims by conservative groups for tax-exempt status,
several lawmakers set their sights on acting IRS Commissioner
Steven Miller.
Miller, who met with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max
Baucus on Tuesday, has not commented publicly on the scandal.
But on Wednesday, CNN quoted a congressional source as
saying that Miller had said that the IRS had pinpointed two
“rogue” employees in the agency’s Cincinnati, Ohio, office as
being principally responsible for “overly aggressive” reviews of
requests for tax-exempt status by groups associated with the
conservative Tea Party movement.
On Capitol Hill, House of Representatives Speaker John
Boehner offered the most direct criticism at the IRS: “My
question isn’t about who is going to have to resign. My question
is who is going to jail over this scandal.”
Meanwhile, all 45 Republican members of the U.S. Senate sent
Obama a letter demanding that his Democratic administration
fully comply with congressional requests for information in the
scandal.
“The American people deserve to know what actions will be
taken to ensure those who made these policy decisions at the IRS
are being held fully accountable and more importantly what is
being done to ensure that this kind of raw partisanship is fully
eliminated from these critically important non-partisan
government functions,” the senators wrote.
The Justice Department has launched a criminal probe of the
IRS, and on Wednesday a third congressional committee announced
that it would begin its own investigation.
Obama on Tuesday called the findings in the Treasury
Department report “intolerable and inexcusable” and directed his
administration to hold those responsible for the agency’s
actions accountable.
On Wednesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the
president would meet with Treasury Department officials later in
the day to discuss next steps in the IRS investigation.
(Additional reporting by Thomas Ferraro, Richard Cowan, Kevin
Drawbaugh; writing by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Jim Loney)
