Senate Finance to discuss IRS in secret

The Senate Finance Committee is going to meet in secret in the coming weeks to delve into the panel’s bipartisan inquiry into the IRS’s improper treatment of Tea Party groups.

Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), have said that they want to release the report before the Senate goes on its August recess, but have yet to set a date for the closed session. The committee needs to close the session over its IRS report to protect taxpayer information, the Finance panel said Tuesday.

{mosads}“Throughout this process, we have been committed to ensuring a complete and thorough investigation, and this closed session will give members an opportunity to review our findings and vote to submit the report to the full Senate if they choose,” Wyden and Hatch said in a statement. 

Hatch and former Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) kicked off the committee’s investigation into the IRS in May 2013, shortly after former agency official Lois Lerner apologized for the IRS’s actions.

But the release of the committee’s final report has been repeatedly delayed – including by the IRS’s announcement last year that it couldn’t find an untold number of Lerner’s emails. 

The Treasury inspector general for tax administration recently found that the IRS improperly destroyed thousands of Lerner’s emails, which went missing after her computer crashed. But the inspector general did not say that the emails were destroyed to conceal any information about the IRS’s Tea Party controversy.