The Clinton administration and House Speaker Gingrich traded shots Monday over proposals to overhaul the IRS.
Gene Sperling, director of the White House's National Economic Council, called a GOP-backed proposal to recreate the IRS "a recipe for conflicts of interest, less accountability and less trust."
Sperling said the White House was outraged by the stories of IRS misconduct revealed at last week's Senate Finance Committee hearings. But he said the independent oversight board proposed in legislation by Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., and Rep. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, was "extremely misguided." It would be inadvisable, Sperling said, to have "part-time managers who would be themselves involved in a range of financial transactions."
Gingrich quickly called on President Clinton to repudiate Sperling's statement. If not, Gingrich told Clinton in a letter, "You will have allied yourself with the IRS' bureaucratic machine and turned your back on the millions of Americans who have been pulled through its gears. ... Clearly, the IRS is out of control and needs to be reformed."
Earlier this year, Kerrey and Portman co-chaired the bipartisan National Commission on Restructuring the IRS, which developed a set of recommendations the two have converted into legislative language.
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