Throughout two congressional hearings, Internal Revenue Service officials and the Treasury Department inspector general have insisted that investigators found no evidence that the agency was motivated by politics when it subjected conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status to extra scrutiny.
True, Treasury Department Inspector General J. Russell George made clear during Tuesday’s Senate Finance Committee hearing into the matter that no evidence of political motivation has been found “yet.”
But Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., among the last to receive question time during the first round of Senate questioning, raised a salient point when he attempted to extract from the former and outgoing IRS commissioners exactly who at the IRS was responsible for assembling the “be on the lookout,” or BOLO, list that was used to target conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status during the last two elections cycles:
If neither former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, nor outgoing commissioner Steven T. Miller, can point to the employee or employees who hatched this plan, which they have repeatedly insisted they cannot, how can they be so sure that the indvidual or indivudals behind it weren’t politicaly motivated to aid President Obama and the Democrats?
Obama and congressional Democrats are clearly outraged about what happened at the IRS; possibly not as much as conservatives would prefer, but it’s apparent that they are not pleased with what happened at the nation’s tax administration agency.
But until Treasury investigators or a congressional committee, or both, can figure out who was responsible for the targeting, and question them about how and why they developed their approach, it would appear premature, as Toomey suggests, to settle on a conclusion to one of the biggest unanswered questions that remain since the House Ways and Means panel launched the congressional committee phase of this scandal:
Why did it occur in the first place?
