WASHINGTON – A government watchdog has found that the Internal Revenue Service spent about $50 million to hold at least 220 conferences for employees between 2010 and 2012, a House committee said Sunday.

The chairman of that committee, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., also released excerpts of congressional investigators’ interviews with employees of the IRS office in Cincinnati.

Issa said the interviews indicated the employees were directed by Washington to subject tea party and other conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status to tough scrutiny.

The excerpts provided no direct evidence that Washington had ordered that screening. The top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, said none of the employees interviewed have so far identified any IRS officials in Washington as ordering that targeting.

The conference spending included $4 million for an August 2010 gathering in Anaheim, Calif., for which the agency did not negotiate lower room rates, even though that is standard government practice. Instead, some of the 2,600 attendees received benefits, including baseball tickets and stays in presidential suites that normally cost $1,500 to $3,500 per night.

In addition, 15 outside speakers were paid a total of $135,000 in fees, with one paid $17,000 to talk about “leadership through art,” the House committee said.

The report by the Treasury Department’s inspector general, due to be released Tuesday, comes as the IRS already is facing bipartisan criticism after agency officials disclosed they had targeted tea party and other conservative groups.

The Treasury Department released a statement Sunday saying the administration “has already taken aggressive and dramatic action to reduce conference spending.”

IRS spokeswoman Michelle Eldridge said Sunday that spending on large agency conferences with 50 or more participants fell from $37.6 million in the 2010 budget year to $4.9 million in 2012.

On Friday, the new acting commissioner, Danny Werfel, released a statement on the forthcoming report criticizing the Anaheim meeting.

“This conference is an unfortunate vestige from a prior era,” Werfel said. “While there were legitimate reasons for holding the meeting, many of the expenses associated with it were inappropriate and should not have occurred.”

Werfel, a former official at the White House Office of Management and Budget, said reducing excessive personal travel has been “a personal priority for me” and said “taxpayers should take comfort that a conference like this would not take place today.”

Two videos produced by the IRS were shown at the Anaheim conference. In one, agency employees did a parody of “Star Trek” while dressed like the TV show’s characters; the second shows more than a dozen IRS workers dancing on a stage. The two videos cost the agency more than $50,000 to make, aides said.

The lecturer who spoke about leadership through art produced six paintings of subjects that included Abraham Lincoln, Michael Jordan, the rock singer Bono and the Statue of Liberty, the aides said.

 

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