House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is giving a jolt to the congressional probe of the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups with a new subpoena that was issued late Thursday night.
Issa and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) have for months sought documents from the Treasury Department that they say would detail a wide range of interactions with the IRS well before the public learned that conservative groups were singled out for extra scrutiny.
The subpoena, the second that Issa has issued since the controversy broke, came as House Republicans are struggling to find any officials outside of the IRS with links to the targeting controversy — and as the matter has largely been shunted to the side by other issues such as ObamaCare.
"The American people deserve to know the full extent and breadth of the IRS's misconduct and the Treasury Department's awareness of this misconduct," Issa and Jordan wrote to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew in September.
Oversight’s subpoena comes just days before the six-month anniversary of the controversy, which broke May 10 after a top IRS official, Lois Lerner, acknowledged the agency had wrongly singled out Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status.
The revelations caused a stir up and down Pennsylvania Avenue before being overshadowed by the conflict in Syria, the government shutdown and most recently the error-ridden rollout of President Obama’s signature healthcare law.
Still, even outside of Issa’s newest subpoena, there’s evidence that the targeting controversy could soon return to the forefront.
Senate Finance investigators have been working on a bipartisan inquiry into the targeting for the better part of six months, with an eye toward releasing a report in December.
Committee aides say Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and the panel’s ranking member, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), are aiming to have the report out this year, though the report could easily slip into 2014 due to delays caused by the shutdown.
Finance members from both sides of the aisle have said they think their report will shed significant light on how and why the targeting occurred, after having taken pains to contrast their approach to the partisan acrimony generated by the House’s investigation.
“We’ve been doing an awful lot of work that we don’t talk about. We don’t have a hearing every whipstitch,” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) told The Hill on Thursday. “So I think we’re going to have something substantial here fairly quickly.”
“I think we chose, from a standpoint of our oversight of it, not to do it publicly,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.).
“Right now, we have great bipartisan cooperation, which should give great comfort to the American people that when the final report comes out, we will have identified those things that need to be changed or those things that potentially broke the law.”
Still, some senators have expressed concern that the Finance report will, at best, be released some seven months after the agency first disclosed the targeting.
“But I trust Max Baucus to follow through on it,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), another Finance member. “We should go ahead and finish the IRS as fast as possible.”
Issa and Jordan, along with top Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, originally sought information from Treasury in June, including details about a briefing before the 2012 election that the inspector general for tax administration gave to Treasury’s general counsel.
The GOP lawmakers are also seeking any input that Treasury might have given IRS higher-ups before they testified before Congress in 2012, including appearances after senior officials learned of the targeting.
In all, House Republicans are seeking information in nine different areas, dating back as far as January 2009.
The Oversight Committee says it has received around 1,200 pages from the Treasury Department, and that several of their questions have gone totally unanswered. ......
http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/domestic-taxes/189664-rep-issa-jolts-probe-of-irs-targeting-with-new-subpoena
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Friday, November 8, 2013
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