IRS official apologizes for $4M conference
IRS official apologizes for $4M conference
WASHINGTON — An Internal Revenue Service official whose division staged a lavish $4.1 million training conference and who starred as Mr. Spock in a “Star Trek” parody shown at the 2010 gathering conceded to Congress on Thursday that taxpayer dollars were wasted in the episode.
Faris Fink, a top deputy in the agency’s small business division at the time Fink, who now heads that 24,000-employee division, told the Government Oversight and Reform Committee he believes many of the expenditures “should have been more closely scrutinized or not incurred at all and were not the best use of taxpayer dollars.”
The mea culpa was echoed by new acting IRS chief Danny Werfel as the embattled agency struggled to contain public and congressional ire over its targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status and its spending of $49 million on 225 employee conferences over the past three years.
Werfel called the 2010 gathering in Anaheim, Calif., “an unfortunate vestige from a prior era” and said IRS spending on travel and training has fallen 80 percent since then.
“Our work in this area is one part of a much larger effort to chart a path forward in the IRS. This is obviously a very challenging time for the agency,” Werfel said.
Officials investigate Philly demolition
PHILADELPHIA — The search for victims of a building collapse that killed six people, including two Salvation Army workers, wound down Thursday amid mounting questions about whether the demolition company that was tearing down the structure caused the tragedy by cutting corners.
The four-story building along Philadelphia’s busy Market Street collapsed Wednesday onto a Salvation Army thrift shop next door with a loud boom and a huge cloud of dust, trapping employees and others, including a woman on her first day on the job at the store.
“Buildings get demolished all the time in the city of Philadelphia with active buildings right next to them. … They’re done safely in this city all the time,” Mayor Michael Nutter said Thursday. Despite Nutter’s reassurances, Philadelphia began inspecting hundreds of demolition sites in the wake of the collapse. The Department of Licenses and Inspections said it had 300 open demolition permits throughout the city; inspectors had visited about 30 of the sites by Thursday afternoon and planned to get to the rest by next week.
The spot inspections included all four construction and demolition sites connected to Griffin Campbell Construction, the demolition contractor involved in the deadly collapse. The city found violations at two sites and ordered a halt to the work.
Transplant rulings raise questions of fairness
WASHINGTON — It’s a life or death matter: Who gets the next scarce donated organ? In an unprecedented challenge to the nation’s transplant system, a federal judge has allowed one dying child — and a day later another — to essentially jump the line in rulings that could have ramifications for thousands of people awaiting new organs.
Over and over, the nation debates the fairness of transplant policies, from Mickey Mantle’s liver in the 1990s to people today who cut their wait times by moving to another city where the list is shorter. But back-to-back rulings by a federal judge this week appear to be a legal first that specialists expect to prompt more lawsuits from people seeking a shorter wait, just like the parents of two patients in a Philadelphia hospital — 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan and 11-year-old Javier Acosta.
“People who have privilege or people who complain more loudly or have political voice shouldn’t be able to claim special treatment,” said Lawrence O. Gostin, a prominent health law professor at Georgetown University, who questioned the legal basis of the rulings.
By wire sources