IRS Reaps Rewards for "Bone-headed Decisions"

Embattled IRS plans employee bonuses for 2013 work to ‘boost morale’.  Poor babies.

Citing the need to boost employee morale, the Internal Revenue Service’s new commissioner said Monday that he will pay out millions of dollars in bonuses to agency employees, reversing a decision his predecessor made to save money amid the sequester budget cuts and other belt-tightening last year.

The agency remains under fire for targeting tea party groups, but Commissioner John Koskinen said the bonuses are needed to retain and attract good employees in a time of cutbacks.

“This is money best spent on our existing employees,” he said in an email to agency employees. “The performance award payouts are in recognition of that great work done in very trying circumstances. I firmly believe that this investment in our employees will directly benefit taxpayers and the tax system.”

In his ever so brief but contentious interview with Bill O'Riley before the Super Bowl, Preznit Obama denied that the IRS had even the slightest smidgen of corruption, but had only made some "bone-headed decisions" on how to evaluate conservative groups request for tax-exempt status.

Allow me to steal liberally from The PJ Tatler on the scandal:

. . .The IRS leaked the existence of the abuse in a conference call last May, and apologized for it at the same time. The leak itself came just ahead of an inspector general’s report that was about to disclose the abuse. The agency blamed the abuse on “rogue” officials in its Cincinnati office, but officials later testified that they were acting on orders from IRS headquarters in Washington. It was eventually revealed that the IRS leaked information from conservative groups to their critics on the left.

Career IRS lawyer Carter Hull testified that the applications involved were reviewed by William Wilkins, an Obama appointee in the IRS counsel’s office.

Then IRS commissioner Doug Shulman’s wife tweeted political attacks on the same groups that the IRS was abusing.

Nope, no conflict of interest there.

Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the abuse, eventually invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than testify before Congress about her role in the abuse. She developed a history of using her government positions to target and abuse conservatives.

She was allowed to retire from the IRS last year rather than be fired. It was Lerner who first revealed the abuse. It turned out that she had worked with the White House counsel’s office on a “careful plan” to manage the rollout of the scandal, to minimize its damage. Lerner blamed the “rogue” officers in Cincinnati, but she had emailed colleagues that the Tea Party scrutiny was “very dangerous” and sought to work some of the tax-exempt applications involved from Washington.

In January 2014, the Obama donor appointed to “investigate” the abuse declined to bring any charges against anyone, which leads to the question: Why did Lois Lerner take the Fifth? If there were no crimes committed, how could Lerner incriminate herself?

I don't think corruption is quite the right word, alas, allowing Obama off on a terminological basis. Corruption would be the IRS accepting bribes to do the dirty work of disenfranchising the democrats opponents. No one is alleging that. What is being alleged is a administration tolerated (and likely encouraged, if the paperwork can ever be discovered to prove it) the actions by the naturally pro-big government IRS staff against the citizens who would agitate for smaller government.  Petty tyranny by petty tyrants.

There's no way the IRS staff should be getting bonuses to help them retain staff, particularly if resources are scarce.

UPDATE: Administration still stonewalling on the IRS investigation

The old “ongoing investigation” trick:

The Justice Department has rebuffed a House Republican’s plan to hold an oversight hearing this Thursday featuring a key criminal investigator from the team reviewing mishandling of tax-exempt status applications by the Internal Revenue Service. . .But Bosserman will not appear, said Deputy Attorney General James Cole in a Jan. 30 reply to Jordan, as published in a tax-exempt organizations newsletter edited by attorney Paul Streckfus.

“The department’s longstanding policy, applied across administrations, is to decline to provide Congress with non-public information about ongoing criminal investigations,” Cole wrote.

(Hat-tip: Joe Schoffstall at Capitol City Project.)
This is predictable cover-up strategy: Key witnesses plead the Fifth in congressional hearings and the “ongoing investigation” becomes an excuse for the administration to tell Congress nothing about the investigation which may or may not actually be “ongoing” in any meaningful sense. The administration is investigating itself, and if you think this kind of “investigation” will find any wrongdoing by anyone, you don’t understand how the game works.