(Bloomberg) -- The IRS has fixed its errors, such as improper extra scrutiny of Tea Party groups, and they won’t happen again, the tax agency’s commissioner said Tuesday.
“The changes are so significant throughout the agency that you could hang a sign on our headquarters saying ‘Under New Management,’” Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen said in prepared remarks for a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.
The IRS has imposed limits to prevent problems such as overspending on conferences and videos, and inappropriate scrutiny of politically oriented nonprofit groups, he said.
“While these problems are important, and deserved our attention and the remedies we have applied, they are from a prior era,” he said, according to the prepared text. “We have addressed them so they will not happen again. That really does make it a new day at the IRS. It’s not the IRS of 2010, 2011 or even 2012.”
To bolster his point, Koskinen said that 46 percent of the agency’s executives -- including two-thirds of the senior leadership team -- have left since October 2011. While the IRS is a large agency and will always have some problems, the key is to find and address them quickly, he said.
Congress has been investigating the IRS and restricting its budget since May 2013, when the agency revealed that it had given extra scrutiny to the applications of Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status. Other issues -- including lavish conferences, an embarrassing Star Trek-themed video and bonuses paid to tax-delinquent employees -- emerged after that.
Bigger Workload
Koskinen, 75, became commissioner in December 2013. He is trying to persuade Congress to increase the agency’s budget after a 3 percent cut this year. At the same time the agency’s workload has expanded, partly because of its responsibility to implement parts of Obamacare.
With the budget cuts, the commissioner has warned of declining service to taxpayers and said the government won’t be able to collect as much money through tax enforcement.
“Further cuts, with the increasing responsibilities we face, threaten to destroy the ability of the IRS to discharge its fundamental responsibilities,” he said.
Republican lawmakers have told Koskinen that he won’t get what he’s requesting. They say they haven’t seen the kind of cultural shift at the IRS that Koskinen has claimed credit for.
Republican Representative Peter Roskam of Illinois told reporters earlier this month that institutions like the IRS don’t change without outside pressure.
“We’re going to try to influence this for the good,” said Roskam, chairman of a House oversight subcommittee. “Where we are on the diagnostic? How loud is the clap meter right now? Pretty quiet, I’d say. I think we’ve got a long way to go in terms of confidence-building.”
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