Reprinted from The Washington Times , 5am -- April 29, 1998
IRS discipline lax at top, Senate committee is told
By John Godfrey
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
T
op managers at the IRS are not held to the same standards for misconduct as their employees, according to a labor relations manager in the tax collection agency's national office.
"The whistleblowers are ostracized and careers destroyed," said Yvonne D. DesJardins in testimony yesterday before the Senate Finance Committee.
"Those senior officials who engaged in the misconduct, which was reported and substantiated, are not only protected from receiving any disciplinary actions, but are oftentimes rewarded during the same year the misconduct occurred," said Miss DesJardins, who has worked for the IRS since 1991. She has been chief of employee and labor relations for the IRS Office of Chief Counsel since 1996.
Her statement, along with other damaging testimony from Treasury's Office of the Inspector General and from four private lawyers, opened the first of four scheduled days of hearings on charges of IRS abuse.
"Again, this shows this is an agency in need of a change of culture," said Finance Committee Chairman William V. Roth Jr., Delaware Republican, who held a similar three-day hearing last September exploring charges of abuse in the IRS' tax collection efforts.
According to Harry G. Patsalides, Treasury's deputy assistant inspector general, an investigation of the IRS' Houston district showed that "IRS management appears to treat managers differently when it pertains to disciplinary action."
Mr. Patsalides also said the IRS' national director of equal employment opportunity and diversity was reassigned, but not demoted, after substantiated charges of sexual harassment were leveled against him in December 1996.
The IRS promised to review the charges made yesterday, and, according to a statement released yesterday afternoon, IRS Commissioner Charles O. Rossotti "will ask Miss DesJardins to meet with him personally to review the matters she raised in her testimony today."
Mr. Rossotti will not have a chance to testify before the committee until Friday and even then may be hamstrung by taxpayer privacy requirements. According to the IRS, the Finance Committee has not yet filed the consent forms that will allow Mr. Rossotti to discuss taxpayer cases.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Rossotti announced he had asked William Webster to review the tax collection agency's criminal investigative arm.
IRS Deputy Commissioner Michael Dolan said, "I welcome this review of the disciplinary determinations I have made." He was one of the few IRS employees named during the nearly four-hour hearing. Miss DesJardins has charged that Mr. Dolan's office sat on decisions to discipline IRS executives and senior managers.
Mr. Webster is currently in private practice but served as director of the CIA under Presidents Reagan and Bush and director of the FBI under Presidents Carter and Reagan.
The audit is part of a seven-point program announced Monday to improve the Criminal Investigation Division (CID). A similar review is being conducted of the IRS' Inspection Service -- the equivalent of a police department's office of internal affairs -- by Charles Bowsher, former head of the General Accounting Office.
Mr. Roth applauded the step but urged Mr. Webster's task force to "look at whether some of the responsibilities of the IRS' criminal investigations division should be transferred to the Justice Department or the Drug Enforcement [Administration]." Mr. Roth said the CID has made increasing use of search warrants and grand jury investigations, law enforcement techniques reserved for hard-core or violent criminals.
Witnesses said the IRS picked up these habits in joint ventures with the FBI and the DEA, ventures in which Congress has pressured the IRS to participate. But Mr. Roth said the IRS, not Congress, is to blame.
Others questioned the commissioner's timing for announcing the review of the CID.
"Always the IRS is coming up as a Johnny-come-lately," said Sen. Charles Grassley, Iowa Republican. "Why is the IRS only willing to make changes ... when Congress is about to unveil some wrongdoing?"
Democrats wondered why Mr. Roth is holding hearings when legislation to fix the problem is waiting on the Senate floor.
"If we are going to spend our time on these hearings, I wish they could be balanced," said Sen. Max Baucus, Montana Democrat. "But since that is not possible, I urge you to move quickly to pass a good IRS restructuring bill through the Senate."
As in September's hearings, witnesses came with a host of horror stories.
Ray Cody Mayo Jr., a Louisiana tax lawyer who also works as assistant district attorney for Caddo Parish, said he was targeted for audit and criminal investigation after refusing to allow a client to be interviewed by the IRS.
Philip A. MacNaughton had an elderly client with heart disease die in the midst of an IRS collection effort.
"No one can be certain that the revenue officer [caused] this taxpayer's death," he said, "but it is absolutely clear to me that an IRS revenue officer demonstrated a callous disregard for a taxpayer's life."
Robert E. Davis had a 45-year-old woman as a client who had 10 IRS special agents conduct an all-day search of her home so that an appraiser could assess the value of the furnishings left to her by her grandmother.
The IRS believed her father had undervalued the furniture on her grandmother's estate-tax return, but it later abandoned the investigation, Mr. Davis said.
Sen. Bob Kerrey, Nebraska Democrat, asked whether the IRS restructuring bill would solve the problems about which they testified, but none could answer.
"I think our witnesses are not prepared to do the most important thing we need, which is to evaluate a piece of legislation we are about to pass," Mr. Kerrey said later.
Today, the committee is expected to hear from taxpayers who will claim they have been abused by the Criminal Investigation Division.Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of
The Washington Times.
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