Danny Werfel, the new head of the Internal Revenue Service, plans to issue a report showing the steps that the tax collection agency will take in order to ensure that another debacle like the one involving the tax-exempt status of conservative groups never happens again, according to Politico.
"The IRS is committed to correcting its mistakes, holding individuals accountable as appropriate and establishing a control element that will help us mitigate the risks we face," Werfel said in a conference call with reporters.
While announcing the way Werfel plans on fixing the agency the new chief also revealed that the "Be On the Look Out," or BOLO, lists that were used to choose which organizations would receive an extra look as they attempted to gain tax-exempt status inappropriately targeted more than just conservative groups. Werfel declined to disclose any of the other groups that may have been targeted or what criteria was used to target them on the other BOLO lists, according to the Huffington Post.
"When I got to the IRS, we started a more comprehensive review of the operations of this part of the IRS, have been looking at documents and business operations, and we did determine and discover that there are other BOLO lists in place," Werfel said. "And upon discovering that, we also found that we believed there continued to be inappropriate or questionable criteria on these BOLO lists. Once we came to that conclusion, we took immediate action to suspend the use of these lists in the exempt organizations unit within the IRS."
In the conference call with reporters Werfel said that his investigation had yet to come up with any wrongdoing in the scandal that targeted conservative groups but was insistent that the investigation had yet to finish.
"The fact that no evidence is surfacing as wrongdoing is an important conclusion to reach as long as it is qualified by the fact that more reviews are underway," Werfel told reporters. "And so, I'll be as clear as I can right now. I'm not providing a definitive conclusion that no intentional wrongdoing occurred. But I'm suggesting that based on the ongoing reviews to date, no evidence has yet surfaced."
