Maybe This Man Needs an Audit

By DAVID ELLIS/

IRS Commissioner Fred Goldberg is feeling some heat. A report by the House Government Operations Committee blasts the IRS for high-level misconduct and cover-ups. "Crooks auditing crooks," charges committee chairman John Conyers Jr. of Michigan. Even worse, a second report by a Goldberg-picked panel of outside experts concludes that the commissioner's solutions to the crisis are "narrow" and deal mostly with "symptoms rather than root causes." Specifically, the panel found that many IRS criminal-investigation agents are not supervised, nor are they adequately trained in ethics. The report was sent to Goldberg on Oct. 26, but it has not been released to Congress or the public. "I don't know why it's taking him so long," says a panel member. "We assumed he would release it within days."

With reporting by David E. Thigpen