Senate panel’s IRS report due in weeks

The Senate Finance Committee plans to release its report on the IRS’s improper scrutiny of conservative groups before lawmakers leave Washington for the August recess, a panel spokesman said Tuesday. 

The committee’s IRS investigation has lasted for more than two years, ever since former agency official Lois Lerner apologized in May 2013 for the IRS’s treatment of groups seeking tax-exempt status.

{mosads}Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and aides have been saying for months that the committee would be able to release its final report after a federal watchdog reported back on thousands of Lerner’s missing emails.

J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, said last month that IRS staffers wrongly destroyed more than 400 back-up tapes, containing as many as 24,000 emails, after the agency knew that many of Lerner’s emails had gone missing.

The Finance spokesman said Hatch and the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), appreciated the inspector general’s efforts to find Lerner’s missing emails.

“Given the committee’s ongoing commitment to ensuring a complete and thorough investigation into this issue, the senators will review TIGTA’s report in its entirety and expect to issue a final report regarding the IRS’s treatment of tax-exempt groups by the August state work period,” the spokesman said.

George and a top deputy told the House Oversight Committee in June that the back-up tapes were destroyed more out of incompetence than any desire to hide Lerner’s emails.

But the likely permanent loss of at least some of Lerner’s emails enraged Republicans, who have long accused the IRS and President Obama’s administration of impeding their investigation into the agency’s singling out of conservative groups and have targeted the tax agency’s budget.

Democrats have long maintained that those months of investigations have found no evidence of political motivation behind the IRS’s actions.

Finance aides previously had said they were almost finished with their IRS investigation when the agency admitted in June 2014 that it couldn’t find all of Lerner’s emails.

But leaders of the tax-writing committee have also said they were close to wrapping up their inquiry well over a year ago – before even former Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) left to become Obama’s ambassador to China.

The Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations released its report on the Tea Party controversy last year, and other congressional panels are also looking into the IRS’s actions.