WASHINGTON, June 6 (UPI) — A $4.1 million Internal Revenue Service meeting shows a “culture of excess,” U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa said after the release of a Treasury Department audit.
The audit, coming at a time when the nation’s tax-collecting agency is already under fire for targeting conservative groups for special scrutiny when they apply for tax-exempt status, will be the subject of a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing Thursday, said the California Republican, who presides over the panel.
The August 2010 Anaheim, Calif., meeting — the most expensive of 225 audited IRS conferences totaling $49 million from the 2010 fiscal year through fiscal 2012 — was paid for in part by using $3.2 million from a budget intended to hire more tax-enforcement officers, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report said.
The report is available at tinyurl.com/Treasury-IRS-Audit.
The $3.2 million transfer for the conference took place the same year the IRS began singling out Tea Party and other conservative groups that sought tax-exempt status, in part because the agency said it didn’t have the personnel to handle the overwhelming amount of applications.
Among the Anaheim conference’s expenditures was $17,000 for a speaker who drew pictures of singer Bono, physicist Albert Einstein, basketball star Michael Jordan and the Statue of Liberty to inspire IRS employees to “find creative solutions to challenges,” the report said.
Another speaker earned $25,000 plus a demanded $2,500 for first-class air travel to give two speeches about “how seemingly random combinations of ideas can drive radical innovations,” said the contract cited in the report.
“No travel receipts were obtained by the IRS for our review, and the contracting officer did not know whether the speaker traveled first class or not,” the report said.
Indeed, the nation’s tax-collecting agency — notorious for being a strict disciplinarian when it comes to regular taxpayers’ record-keeping — “was unable to provide documentation to support all costs associated with the conference,” the report said.
The $4.1 million conference for 2,609 employees of the IRS’s Small Business/Self-Employed Division may have actually cost $4.3 million, the report said.
“In addition, we requested supporting documentation related to the $50,187 expended for ‘videos,'” the report said. “However, IRS management stated that this was an estimated cost and could not provide detail on how this cost was estimated. In addition, IRS management could not provide any supporting documentation detailing how this money was spent.”
Those videos included a “Star Trek” parody and a “Cupid Shuffle” line dance.
Acting IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said ahead of the Tuesday report the conference spending “should not have occurred” and called the event “an unfortunate vestige from a prior era” he said wouldn’t take place today.
Indeed, the audit indicated such expenditures fell dramatically when the Obama administration clamped down on travel and conferences after a scandal erupted over how much the General Services Administration spent on conferences.
IRS spending for such meetings was $4.8 million in the 2012 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, down from $37.5 million in fiscal 2010.
But Issa said the IRS was “an agency in crisis.”
“The wasteful Anaheim conference is one example of a culture of excess that plagues the IRS and many federal agencies,” he said in a statement Tuesday.
“Taxpayer money meant to pay for a core agency mission, the hiring of more enforcement personnel, was instead spent on a lavish party,” he said. “Perhaps most disturbingly, there appears to have been little or no effort by the IRS to hold those responsible for this wasteful spending accountable.”
Copyright 2013 United Press International, Inc. (UPI).
The HAVES = PUBLIC SERVANTS —–The HAVE NOTS= private pizzed on sector.