IRS Paid Speaker $17,000 to Paint Michael Jordan at Event

‘Dance Party’

Agency employees also participated in a “dance party”video that mentioned plans for the Anaheim conference.

IRS officials estimated the event for about 2,600 employees cost $4.1 million, according to the inspector general’s report. The agency’s auditors were unable to verify the cost figure, the report said.

“Procedures at the time of the conference did not require IRS management to track and report actual conference costs,”the review said. As a result, the inspector general “could not validate the conference cost.”

Daniel Werfel, the acting IRS commissioner, said in a statement last week that the event was “an unfortunate vestige from a prior era” and the agency has since cut training and travel expenses.

The General Services Administration and the Department ofVeterans Affairs had similar audits last year for employee conference spending. General Services Administration expenditures included $823,000 on a Las Vegas event featuring a clown, a mind reader and a $75,000 bicycle building exercise. Martha Johnson, the GSA administrator, resigned amid the scandal.

Department of Veterans Affairs employees improperly accepted gifts such as massages and incurred $762,000 in unauthorized and wasteful expenses tied to two conferences inFlorida, the agency’s inspector general reported last year. John Sepulveda, the VA’s assistant secretary for human resources, resigned the day before the report was released.

To contact the reporters on this story: Kathleen Miller in Washington at kmiller01@bloomberg.net; Richard Rubin in Washington at rrubin12@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Stephanie Stoughton at sstoughton@bloomberg.net; Jodi Schneider at jschneider50@bloomberg.net

Article Appeared @http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-04/irs-paid-speaker-17-000-to-paint-michael-jordan-at-event.html

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