Scandalabra: another #IRS official takes the Fifth

**Posted by Phineas

"They took down Capone, but can they handle the IRS?"
“They took down Capone, but can they handle the IRS?”

But it’s not over targeting conservative groups: this one seems to be centered around good old-fashioned graft. Almost refreshing, really:

A Virginia company inappropriately secured contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the Internal Revenue Service based on false statements and personal ties to an IRS official, the top Republican investigator in the U.S. House of Representatives said on Tuesday.

A report issued by Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa of California said the IRS, which is embroiled in a series of unrelated controversies, awarded the contracts to computer networking and security company Strong Castle Inc.

The report said Strong Castle’s president, Braulio Castillo, relied on a friendship with an IRS contracting official, Gregory Roseman, to win business. It said the company made false statements to beat rivals for the work.

The cost of Strong Castle’s 2012 contracts to the IRS, including for work in future years, could reach nearly $500 million, the report said.

And, guess what, Rosenman’s lawyer has notified the committee he plans to take the Fifth. That’ll do wonders for the agency’s image.

Can anyone give me one good reason, even if we did maintain our Byzantine tax code, why we shouldn’t subject the IRS to Roman decimation, disband the survivors in disgrace, and then tear down their headquarters and salt the earth? They loathe more than half the population that employs them; they deny them equal treatment under the law based on their political beliefs; and apparently they’re steering public money to their buddies. (In return for…?)

And now they have the nerve to plead self-incrimination. Estes Kefauver, where are you when we need you?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the IRS and the Obama administration overall are making a better case for limited government than all the conservative and libertarian group combined have made over the past 20 years. Flat tax or fair tax, I don’t care which you replace the current income tax with, but it’s time to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and abolish the IRS.

via PJM

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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