Rep. Ron Kind Slams IRS for Wasting Taxpayer Dollars

Statement

Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI) harshly criticized the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) following the release of a report by the Treasury Department's inspector general that found nearly $50 million in tax dollars were spent on at least 220 employee conferences between 2010 and 2012.

"Public servants at every level of government need to live up to the trust that has been given them by the American people. Unfortunately, this report shows that some employees at the IRS are once again breaking that trust," said Rep. Kind."Anyone charged with managing our hard-earned tax dollars should do so in the most responsible and prudent manner possible. The IRS needs to become a place where those standards are met in every department, at every level."

The report details instances of IRS personnel spending an alarming amount of tax dollars to host employee conferences, which included lavish hotel rooms, tickets for sporting events and expensive guest speaker fees.

Kind, who has returned a portion of his federal office budget every year to the U.S. Treasury (totaling over $1.4 million returned since coming to Congress), called on the IRS to make immediate internal reforms to prevent such expenditures from happening in the future.

"Public trust in the IRS is at a critically low level. The IRS needs to rebuild that trust, starting by changing the way they do business and putting a stop to these wasteful expenditures immediately," concluded Kind. "The House Ways and Means Committee should hold a hearing to get to the bottom of what happened here, and in any other cases where taxpayer dollars are wasted in this manner."

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