LUXURY HOTEL ROOMS FOR SCANDAL PLAGUED IRS AGENTS COST THE TAXPAYERS FORTY-NINE MILLION DOLLARS!

By JOE CALANDRA JR.
Published: June 4, 2013 | 0 Comments



 “In all, the IRS held two-hundred and twenty-five employee conferences from 2010 through 2012, at a total cost of forty-nine million dollars.”

Those were the chilling figures reported by J. Russell George, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, as reported by the Associated Press today.

It seems that while the IRS was so busy giving Tea Party groups all that personal attention and intimate scrutiny, they forgot to examine their own spending habits. The Inspector General explained that the costs for the IRS events were so high because many agents were staying in extraordinarily expensive hotel rooms, which drove up the costs for the conferences on the whole.

The most outrageously lavish example of IRS executive greed can be found by taking a quick look at the 2010 4.1 million dollar training conference in Anaheim, CA. The AP stated:

“One official stayed five nights in a room that regularly goes for $3,500 a night, George’s report said, and another stayed four nights in a room that regularly goes for $1,499 a night. The agency paid a flat daily fee of $135 per hotel room, it said, but the upgrades were part of a package deal that added to the overall cost of the conference. Without the upgrades, the IRS could have negotiated a lower room rate, as required by agency procedures.”

Don’t think that the Anaheim event was the first time that IRS agents and senior leaders had tremendously high lodging costs during on President Obama’s watch. The AP reported:

“In 2010, for instance, the agency held a conference in Philadelphia that cost $2.9 million, one in San Diego that cost $1.2 million, and one in Atlanta that also cost $1.2 million.”

Though the IRS has a new sheriff in town, Danny Werfel, who has called these sickening figures, “An unfortunate vestige from a prior era,” other federal workers claim to that their federal paychecks are leaving them in extreme poverty.

Yesterday’s edition of The Washington Post reported that many low-wage earning federally contracted employees have been writing President Obama, asking him to personally intervene to make their companies pay them more.

Some of those letters sound like this:

Dear Mr. President:

My name is Ana Julia Fuentes. I have worked as a janitor at Union Station for 23 years but I am only paid 8.75 per hour with no benefits. I don’t even have paid holidays, sick days, and paid vacations, much less health insurance.

Other letters sound like this:

Hello Mr. President,

My name is Ana Salvador. I have worked at McDonald’s for the last 11 years at the Air and Space Museum.

I am a single mother with four children. Because I don’t make enough money to support them, I depend on public assistance, including food stamps and Medicaid. I live in an attic with my four kids in a dangerous neighborhood with a lot of crime.

Sometimes I cry because I cannot give my children [a] better life. I can’t buy them toys or a computer; take them to the movies or on vacation; most of my money goes to pay for rent or transportation.

Mr. President, do you think this is a good life?

http://www.libertynews.com/2013/06/l...llion-dollars/