Former IRS official Lois Lerner has opened up to the public in a lengthy interview, insisting that she is innocent of wrongdoing in the agency’s tea-party targeting scandal and providing context to a public figure that outraged Americans have known only as a government villain.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Lerner told POLITICO, defending her career and her character.
The piece gives a complicated assessment of the controversial figure, as interviews of individuals thrust into the public spotlight with hardly any prior exposure tend to do. One the one hand, for instance, she is charitable and giving to colleagues. On the other, she is described as having a short temper and stubborn work attitude. She was initially criticized for her lack of tax policy credentials at the start of her IRS tenure in 2001 — a pertinent knock against her capacity to lead a critical part of an often untrustworthy agency — but also praised for many accomplishments during her service.
“[M]any practitioners said she accomplished much, including streamlining a complicated tax form for exempt organizations, creating a user-friendly website and jump-starting big projects that yielded reports on complicated areas, like nonprofit hospitals and universities,” POLITICO’S Rachael Bade wrote.
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