WASHINGTON – An Internal Revenue Service official whose division staged a lavish $4.1 million training conference and who starred as Mr. Spock in a “Star Trek” parody shown at the 2010 gathering conceded to Congress on Thursday that taxpayer dollars were wasted in the episode.
“We’re now in a very different environment” with new IRS spending curbs, Faris Fink, a top deputy in the agency’s small business division at the time, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Fink, who now heads that 24,000-employee division, said he believes many of the expenditures “should have been more closely scrutinized or not incurred at all and were not the best use of taxpayer dollars.”
The mea culpa was echoed by new acting IRS chief Danny Werfel as the embattled agency struggled to contain public and congressional ire over its targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status and its spending of $49 million on 225 employee conferences in the last three years.
Werfel called the 2010 gathering in Anaheim, Calif., “an unfortunate vestige from a prior era” and said IRS spending on travel and training has fallen 80 percent since then.
“Our work in this area is part of a much larger effort to chart a path forward in the IRS. This is obviously a very challenging time for the agency,” Werfel said.
Werfel, who testified after Fink had left the committee room, became acting commissioner last month after President Barack Obama forced Steven Miller out of the job. Werfel appeared a day after putting two IRS officials on administrative leave for accepting free food at a party in a private suite at the Anaheim conference.
Fink insisted the IRS followed federal guidelines in planning the Anaheim gathering for 2,600 IRS workers. He said the conference was justified because at the time, around 30 percent of its managers were new and the agency was facing increased security threats.
Sitting at the same witness table was J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general whose scathing reports on the IRS’ targeting of conservatives and conference spending have rocked the agency. George said he uncovered no criminal violations involving the conference.
Those comments didn’t shield Fink from a three-hour tongue-lashing from the panel.
Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., called the spending for the California conference “at best maliciously self-indulgent.”
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., reprised a major GOP theme of the IRS controversy: that the agency will help implement a favorite Republican target, Obama’s health care overhaul.
“It will soon have access to our health information,” Gowdy said of the IRS. “Those are details that we don’t share with people that we do trust, and we’re going to be asked to share it with people who are so disconnected as to spend this amount of money.”
Top panel Democrat Elijah Cummings of Maryland said he viewed the “Star Trek” video at 3 a.m. Thursday and said, “I tried to get to the redeeming value. Can’t get there.” Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., called the video “an insult to the memory of ‘Star Trek.”’
Fink sat stoically as TV screens in the hearing room showed excerpts of that nearly six-minute video, in which he and other IRS employees wore “Star Trek” uniforms on a set resembling the bridge of the series’ Starship Enterprise and Fink sported pointy ears and a black wig.
“It’s embarrassing and I apologize,” he told the lawmakers. He called the video “a well-intentioned way to use humor to open the conference.”
