Is The Obama Administration Using Intimidation To Prevent Inspectors General (Including IG Investigating IRS) From Doing Their Jobs?

Among all the unanswered questions about the IRS’s illegal targeting of conservative organizations, one is most crucial: Who ordered this extreme scrutiny? 

Amazingly, IRS inspector general J. Russell George, responsible for the investigation asking those questions about the IRS, has testified that he did not obtain that information.
Details of that testimony are interesting. Representative Tom Graves (R., Ga.) asked, “Have you asked the individuals who ordered them to use this extra scrutiny to punish, or penalize, or postpone, or deny?” George turns around to confer with his assistant. Just the fact that the inspector general had to confer to know the answer to this crucial question is amazing. George’s assistant says something to him that is not recorded, but one can see the assistant shaking his head back and forth. Then George responds publicly to the question, saying, “During our audit, Congressman, we did pose that question and no one would acknowledge who, if anyone, provided that direction.” 

Anyone who knows anything about the rights and responsibilities of an inspector general has to be shaking his head in disbelief at George’s explanation. First, every employee of the government has the responsibility to cooperate with and provide information to an IG concerning his work. 

Second, George was particularly careful to limit his answer to the “audit phase.” Every IG has two procedures to obtain information. One is audit procedure, to which IG George referred. That’s generally limited to accounting analysis, to determine whether there may be reason to open an investigation. Once there is reason — and there clearly was reason here, given the obviously illegal conduct — the IG opens an investigation, in which investigators, not auditors, pose the questions, the department employees are placed under oath, and, as a federal court has approved, informed that “failure to answer completely and truthfully may result in disciplinary action, including dismissal.” The question is why George’s office didn’t do this immediately. 

From my personal experience as an IG of another agency, I suspect the answer. I do not blame IG George personally, as he is a career civil servant who depends on a steady salary and, thereafter, a pension. 

But I learned, through being fired by the Obama administration, that performing one’s responsibilities as one should, and potentially adversely affecting the administration’s image, is not the way to keep one’s job. (Fortunately, I was not dependent on my federal IG salary.)

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