“Barack Obama fired the most senior tax official in the US on Wednesday in an effort to bring a speedy end to a scandal over the targeting for special scrutiny of Tea Party organisations and other conservative groups. The president said that the acting commissioner, Steven Miller, was asked to resign and that Miller had done so. Miller’s sacking followed an independent report by the Treasury’s inspector general, which found that the conduct in the IRS office in Cincinnati had been ‘inappropriate’. Officials had picked out groups with the words Tea Party or Patriots in their titles and subjected their requests for tax-exempt status to extra scrutiny.”
