IRS official issues apology
Millions were spent on conferences
WASHINGTON – An Internal Revenue Service official whose division staged a lavish $4.1 million training conference and who starred as Mr. Spock in a “Star Trek” parody shown at the 2010 gathering conceded to Congress on Thursday that taxpayer dollars were wasted in the episode.
“We’re now in a very different environment” with new IRS spending curbs, Faris Fink, a top deputy in the agency’s small business division at the time, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Fink, who now heads that 24,000-employee division, said he believes many of the expenditures “should have been more closely scrutinized or not incurred at all and were not the best use of taxpayer dollars.”
The mea culpa was echoed by new acting IRS chief Danny Werfel as the embattled agency struggled to contain public and congressional ire over its targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status and its spending of $49 million on 225 employee conferences during the past three years.
Werfel called the 2010 gathering in Anaheim, Calif., “an unfortunate vestige from a prior era” and said IRS spending on travel and training has fallen 80 percent since then.
“Our work in this area is one part of a much larger effort to chart a path forward in the IRS. This is obviously a very challenging time for the agency,” Werfel said.
Werfel, who testified after Fink had left the committee room, became acting commissioner last month after President Barack Obama forced Steven Miller out of the job. Werfel appeared a day after putting two IRS officials on administrative leave for accepting free food at a party in a private suite at the Anaheim conference.
Behind the scenes, committee investigators have interviewed at least four IRS employees about the targeting of conservative groups for additional scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status during the 2010 and 2012 elections. The Associated Press viewed transcripts of interviews with two employees who work in the Cincinnati office where agents screened the applications.
The transcripts show that the employees believed that officials in Washington were directing their work. But they don’t show any direct evidence that officials in Washington ordered the agents to target tea party groups, or why they may have done so.