They couldn’t have found a more greasy, slimey disgusting looking scapegoat for this. He reminds me of that character on MAD TV that had the same curly hair, an older fatter guy, but damned near looked the same.
My guess is that the Administration told him to get his ass up there before that committee and make them fume. In the end, they’ll get his ass, and it will likely stop there - just like Holder and Obama want.
He actually wasn’t in charge of the IRS or that department when this was happening. Ingraham, who’s been kicked upstairs to manage Bambi’s death plan, is the one who should be grilled because she was in charge of the department.
I watched probably thirty minutes of the questions directed at the guy. Having worked around the government, I’d say that he was a $40-a-word manager. He’s just there because he had the right degree from some ivy league college.
He has zero regard for ethics. I can’t say that he showed any remarkable common sense. And as for managing people....I’d say that he’d do OK at some Piggly Wiggly, but I wouldn’t put him in charge of a real business as an executive.
The one question I would have thrown at him...when you realized this mess last summer (June 2012)...what immediate actions did you take to fix the matter? It appears to me that he just said ‘hmmm, let’s just leave this for the next idiot’. It appears that he did nothing, and the same mess is sitting there today. Personally, I’d also bring in the HR folks who hired all these incompetent folks in the first place....and fire fifty percent of them at random. You folks recruited losers, and continued to do it on a yearly basis.
The last organization that ought to run the health care finance side....is the IRS. I’d hand it over to the National Park Service....before I’d give it to these folks.