IRS Commissioner John Koskinen will not appear at a Tuesday impeachment hearing examining allegations of his misconduct despite an invitation to testify from the House Judiciary Committee.
As reported by Politico, the IRS says the Commissioner Koskinen does not have time to “fully prepare” because he just returned from China. The agency claims that he was not given enough notice of the hearing, which was scheduled more than a week ago.
The hearing is the first step in examining findings from the House Oversight Committee, which last year called for Koskinen’s impeachment.
Following the revelations that the IRS had been applying improper, politically motivated scrutiny to tea party and conservative organizations, Koskinen was appointed head of the agency promising reform and transparency. Koskinen has failed:
- Throughout the investigation into the targeting scandal, Koskinen’s IRS continually failed to provide important information or perform basic due diligence. Koskinen also made several misleading or incorrect statements while under oath testifying before Congress.
- The IRS failed to search five of six possible sources of electronic media for Lois Lerner’s emails. The only source they bothered to search – her hard-drive – was destroyed after a cursory search deemed information unrecoverable. In hindsight, documentation suggests that more could have been done to recover data.
- The agency’s ineptness — or corruption — resulted in 24,000 Lerner emails being lost when they were “accidentally” destroyed despite the existence of an agency-wide preservation order.
- Koskinen then withheld from Congress both the preservation order and destruction of tapes during sworn testimony. He also failed to disclose details regarding Lois Lerner’s mysteriously destroyed hard drive during testimony.
The carelessness of the agency means that important information is no longer available to Congress and the American people because of the actions of the IRS, while countless misleading statements and dodges have caused investigations to drag on for years.