Mike Thompson: “as you know, part of the IRS reform bill has to do with the creation of an IRS Oversight Board. One of the new members…”

“as you know, part of the IRS reform bill has to do with the creation of an IRS Oversight Board. One of the new members of the IRS Oversight Board is delineated as a representative of an IRS employees union. However, because of the inherent conflict of interest in this new member's position, the union representative was exempted from four essential ethics laws in the criminal code. That is what our amendment addresses, because the ethics experts in the Office of Government Ethics say these provisions are unprecedented and inadvisable and antithetical to sound Government ethics policy; thus, to sound Government. In an era in which we seem to receive an awful lot of very general and hazy messages from the bureaucracy, we are getting a quite definitive, clear-cut opinion out of the Office of Government Ethics with regard to this exemption, and that is that these provisions are unprecedented and, therefore, inadvisable. I think it makes common sense.”