Lawmakers find agreement: We don’t know much about IRS nominee

Lawmakers found at least some bipartisan agreement on President Obama’s new choice to run the embattled IRS — neither side, as it turns out, knew much about John Koskinen.

Members from both parties also said that Obama made a positive step in moving to put a full-time, Senate-confirmed commissioner at the head of an agency that has had temporary leaders for close to nine months.

But while Republicans said they hoped Koskinen could help rebuild taxpayer trust in the IRS, they also expressed concern about the timing of Obama’s announcement and Koskinen’s history of political contributions.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the top Republican on the tax-writing Finance Committee, added that he was “more than a little mystified” that Obama failed to consult him about the nomination. The Finance panel will vet and consider Koskinen’s nomination.

“I commend them for doing it,” Hatch told reporters. “I don’t think they’ve done it in a very smart way.” 

The president nominated Koskinen, a corporate turnaround specialist appointed by former President George W. Bush to oversee Freddie Mac after the financial crisis, on Thursday afternoon.

{mosads}The nomination comes close to three months after the IRS first disclosed, and apologized for, the targeting of Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status. Danny Werfel, the current interim leader at the IRS, took over less than two weeks after that apology.

GOP lawmakers have made the scrutiny given to conservative groups a key issue since then, while also calling into question the agency’s ability to implement the president’s healthcare law.

Obama and congressional Democrats were also quite critical of the IRS at first, but have in recent weeks charged that progressive groups were also targeted for extra scrutiny by the agency.

The White House has argued that investigations into the admitted political targeting by the tax collection agency revealed no partisan motives, with Obama accusing Republicans of pursuing “phony scandals” to the detriment of the economy.

“As testimony has shown that I’ve seen produced publicly in the press — although not by the Republican chairman of the committee — self-identified Republicans who participated in the reviews of these applications for tax-exempt status clearly denied that there was … any partisan or political motivation to what they were doing,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said this week.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) praised the choice of Koskinen, saying in a statement that he hoped to quickly move the nomination through his committee. He said the president’s pick would help the embattled agency regain the public’s trust.

Baucus also told reporters that he had gotten a head’s up from the administration that Koskinen would be the nominee, but pushed back on the idea that the timing of the announcement was aimed at blunting IRS-related criticisms.

House Republicans are currently voting on a slew of IRS measures, and GOP lawmakers plan to make the targeting of groups seeking tax-exempt status a big part of their August messaging back home.

“They just want a good person there,” Baucus said. “And this person has a strong management background, very strong management background. The IRS needs that.”

But Senate Republicans did call the timing curious, with Hatch saying he would have appreciated hearing from the White House about the nominee. The Utah Republican added that the IRS deserved a full-time leader confirmed by the Senate, even as he questioned the White House rollout.

“They must be a little bit afraid of Danny Werfel — that he’s going to cooperate too much,” Hatch said, referring to the acting IRS commissioner. “They certainly haven’t been cooperating.”

“It’s starting to irritate me,” Hatch added. “They are dragging their feet on this.”
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), another Finance Committee member, said he heard about the IRS nominee from reporters.

“This may have been timed to take attention away from all these ‘phony scandals’ that he describes,” Roberts said, referring to the president. “But this is going to be ongoing.”

On the House side, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee, said he didn’t know much about Koskinen. But Brady added that it’s “not necessarily a good sign” that the IRS nominee had given thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates, including Obama.

“I remember the day when the IRS commissioner was an independent commissioner — they were neither seen as Republican or Democrat,” Brady said. “Because the power of the IRS is so strong.”

Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) echoed those concerns and said it was part of a pattern for the Obama administration to drop a nominee like Koskinen, or make big decisions like delaying the employer mandate in the healthcare law, while Congress was either out of town or on its way home.

But Boustany also said there are bound to be frustrations with whomever heads the IRS next. GOP lawmakers initially welcomed Werfel to the IRS, but have since sharply criticized his initial report on what led to the targeting and his request for more funding.

“It’s going to be a hard job. This is an organization that’s in deep trouble,” Boustany said.