James Lankford

You have a tough job in a lot of ways, you know that full well, because we need significant reform.

No, not necessarily. No, it's an individual that has access to the information; they're authenticated as a person that is an employee there.

Just false information at all is hard enough to be able to track on it.

There's a tremendous amount of credit information out there that's in error, obviously.

And that was the plan from the beginning?

So, regardless, employers weren't going to report either way?

Is that mechanism in place now?

Is there a mechanism in place--was there a plan to have a mechanism in place for 2014 for employers to be able to verify their employees do have qualified health plans?

So the first you'd heard about this at all or people at CMS had heard about this at all was June 24th or 25th?

Right. I'm talking about just the background of how do we show that this person, once they've accessed data, that data that they accessed is for official purposes, not unofficial purposes.

This was not a sudden decision late in June, that the administration thought this was a bad idea, let's delay it.

Such privacy breaches are unacceptable and should not happen at all.

I hope this hearing today is not an attempt to do that.

The Affordable Care Act is the law of the land. It has been upheld by the United States Supreme Court.

First, Americans have the right to know the money Washington takes from them is well spent.

The American people's revenue is what we are after.

The private oil and gas companies are doing 10 times the R&D on renewable fuels than what the federal government is.

The thought that you are going to have a 2,500-mile pipeline overseen by 35 people begs reality.

I expect we will hear more from our witnesses today about the important link between promoting religious freedom and combating religious extremism.

Religious freedom should be a nonnegotiable tenet of life in our modern world.

Religious freedom, as we know well, is a core American value.

Flexibility is key here.

We continue to look for ways... as we cut nonessential services, overheads, consolidations, continue to try to find savings.

I know you all are working hard to be able to resolve some of this.

You understand all the issues with this, not only just for IRS, but this is the Director of Implementation and Oversight for the IRS Affordable Care Act office.