Obama said the behavior at the IRS was an 'outrage.' | REUTERS Obama: Acting IRS chief out

President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had requested and accepted the resignation of Steven Miller, the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.

Miller’s resignation is the administration’s first major action in response to the revelation that IRS employees were targeting politically conservative groups for additional scrutiny when applying for tax-exempt status — and in an East Room statement, Obama promised more change to come.


The IRS’s conduct was “inexcusable” and an “outrage,” Obama said. But, he added, “the good news is, it’s fixable.”

( Transcript: Obama's remarks on IRS)

Obama pledged to “do everything in my power to make sure nothing like this happens again” by holding accountable those involved in the wrongdoing, by instituting new safeguards, and by “making sure that the law is applied as it should be in a fair and impartial way.”

The White House, he said, will work with Congress to make sure that happens.

After Obama spoke, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement that if Obama “is as concerned about this issue as he claims, he’ll work openly and transparently with Congress to get to the bottom of the scandal — no stonewalling, no half-answers, no withholding of witnesses.”

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who plans to hold a hearing on the issue next week, said on CNN that Obama “set exactly the right tone” and took “an extremely good first step” in asking Miller to step down. “We very much take him at his word that he wants to be open and transparent” in moving ahead on the issue.

( PHOTOS: 10 slams on the IRS)

Obama spoke soon after the IRS began defending some of its senior leadership, releasing a statement Wednesday saying that its chief counsel, William Wilkins, was not among those who participated in a meeting of agency employees to discuss the targeting of conservative groups. The inspector general’s report suggested that a “chief counsel” had been at an Aug. 4, 2011, meeting on the issue, but the IRS said that the lawyers who attended were actually “several layers below Wilkins.”

Miller, meanwhile, sent an email to IRS employees confirming his departure, which he said will come in early June. The agency, he said, “will benefit from having a new acting commissioner in place during this challenging period.”

The leader of the agency since November, Miller said that he realizes “much work needs to be done to restore faith in the IRS” but also offered an assurance that the “IRS is comprised of incredibly dedicated and hard-working public servants …. I have strong confidence in the IRS leadership team to continue the important work of our agency.”

Miller’s resignation comes after the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names faced extra scrutiny when applying for tax exemption. Even after Lois Lerner, the agency’s director of exempt organizations, raised concerns in the summer of 2011 and called for the revision of criteria used to determine when to scrutinize a group’s request, staffers only briefly changed their behavior.

By early 2012, the report found, workers shifted to target “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and social economic reform/movement.”

Though a draft of the report had been floating around Washington for days, Obama waited until the official release on Tuesday night to offer an unqualified condemnation, calling the agency’s behavior “intolerable and inexcusable.” In remarks at a press conference on Monday, Obama had qualified his assessment with the conditional “if” news reports on the findings were true. White House press secretary Jay Carney offered the same skepticism in his comments earlier this week.

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Obama also called on Lew to “hold those responsible for these failures accountable” and to implement the recommendations made by the inspector general. Those ideas include requiring better documentation of the reasons why certain groups are chosen for greater scrutiny by the IRS, and for the Treasury Department to provide better guidance and for cases to be resolved quickly.

The Justice Department and the FBI have launched their own investigations aimed at determining whether IRS employees broke the law. Attorney General Eric Holder announced his department’s probe on Tuesday, just as House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) asked, “Who’s going to jail over this scandal?”

Holder was asked about the investigation during a Wednesday afternoon hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, while other committees are preparing for their own examinations of the IRS’s behavior.

The first of at least three congressional hearings on the incident will be held Friday by the House Ways and Means Committee. Miller is due to testify. In addition to Issa’s committee hearing, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) has also planned a hearing for next week.