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Fox
News
IRS
supervisor in DC scrutinized
Tea Party groups' cases
June 17, 2013
IRS
supervisor acknowledges
examining Tea Party...
WASHINGTON
– A
Washington-based IRS supervisor
acknowledged she was personally involved in reviewing Tea Party
applications
for tax-exempt status as far back as 2010, Fox News confirms -- a
detail that
further challenges the agency's initial claim that the practice of
singling out
those groups was limited to a handful of employees in Ohio.
Congressional
sources confirmed to
Fox News that Holly Paz, who until recently was a top deputy in the
division
that handles applications for tax-exempt status, told congressional
investigators she reviewed 20 to 30 applications. Some requests
languished for
more than a year without action.
The
account undercuts the narrative
that senior officials only learned of the practice after it had already
started
in the Cincinnati office.
Details
of Paz's role were first
reported by The Associated Press. Still, Paz provided no evidence that
senior
IRS officials ordered agents to target conservative groups or that
anyone in
the Obama administration outside the IRS was involved.
Instead,
Paz described an agency in
which IRS supervisors in Washington worked closely with agents in the
field but
didn't fully understand what those agents were doing. Paz said agents
in
Cincinnati openly talked about handling "tea party" cases, but she
thought the term was merely shorthand for all applications from groups
that
were politically active -- conservative and liberal.
Paz
said dozens of tea party
applications sat untouched for more than a year while field agents
waited for
guidance from Washington on how to handle them. At the time, she said,
Washington officials thought the agents in Cincinnati were processing
the
cases.
Paz
was among the first IRS
employees to be interviewed as part of a joint investigation by the
House
Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the House Ways and Means
Committee.
Congressional
investigators have
interviewed at least six IRS employees as part of their inquiry. The
Associated
Press has reviewed transcripts from three interviews -- with Paz and
with two
agents, Gary Muthert and Elizabeth Hofacre, from the Cincinnati office…
Read
the rest of the article at Fox
News
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