The Internal Revenue Service has replaced the agency’s director of Rulings and Agreements, Holly Paz, who served in that position while her division singled out conesrvative groups for inappropriate scrutiny.
In an internal memo, according to an IRS source, the agency named a new official, Karen Schiller, to the position. Cincinnati’s Fox19 confirms that report.
According to the House Oversight Committee, Paz was involved in an internal IRS investigation that in May 2012 concluded that the agency had been discriminating against conservative groups. That was a year before a Treasury Department inspector General’s report reached the same conclusion, but Paz and others at the IRS failed to inform Congress of the findings of the internal investigation. During the inspector general’s own investigation, Paz, who National Review Online revealed is a donor to Barack Obama, sat in on the vast majority of the interviews conducted by the inspector general’s team. House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa harshly criticized inspector general J. Russell for allowing that, saying it was “inappropriate” to include anybody in the agency in the interviews who could have participated in the targeting of conservative groups.
The IRS source says the memo did not indicate whether has has been moved to a new position, placed on leave, or fired.
Paz is the fifth Washington, D.C.-based IRS official involved in the current scandal to leave her position. She follows Carter Hull, a tax law specialist accused of micromanaging Cincinnati’s handling of tea-party applications; Joseph Grant, the head of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities division, who retired on June 3, just eight days after being promoted; acting commissioner Steven Miller, who announced his resignation days after news of the scandal broke; and Lois Lerner, the director of the Exempt Organizations division and the figure most closely associated with the targeting of conservative groups, who was placed on paid administrative leave after refusing to tender her resignation.