President Barack Obama will Wednesday meet senior Treasury officials to demand accountability after a watchdog report found tax officials unfairly targeted conservative grass roots groups.
Obama spokesman Jay Carney said the president would make clear to the officials that he wanted action, after he said on Tuesday the report had revealed “intolerable” behavior at the Internal Revenue Service.
“He’ll be meeting with Treasury Department officials later today to talk about the next steps that he hopes will be taken,” said Carney.
Obama wants people to be “held accountable for their conduct … (to see) the necessary steps are taken to ensure that this does not happen again.”
The report by a Treasury Department inspector general found that some Internal Revenue Service staff singled out grass roots groups, including some affiliated with the ultra-conservative Tea Party, opposed to Obama.
The scandal surrounding the IRS, an independent agency within the Treasury Department, was one of a clutch of political controversies threatening to halt Obama’s political momentum at the beginning of his second term.
Republicans seized on the episode, revealed publicly on Friday, to claim a pattern of abuse of power and intimidation by the Obama White House.
But the White House said that no one in Obama’s governing or political team had anything to do with targeting the conservative groups over their tax-free status and Obama said he only learned about it from news reports last week.
Obama to meet top officials on IRS scandal
