Josh Barro, Columnist

Steven Miller: Too Incompetent Even for the IRS

Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller wasn't in charge when the agency made its big mess. But now we know he deserved to go anyway.

May 21, 2013 at 3:53 PM UTC

By Josh Barro

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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Last week, when President Barack Obama fired Steven Miller, the acting Internal Revenue Service commissioner, some people wondered whether he was a fall guy. He had only been running the IRS since November, meaning he wasn't in charge when the agency was harassing conservative nonprofit groups.

If the president was looking for someone at the IRS to fire, Miller was his only option. Other bad actors, like Lois Lerner, who directs the IRS division in charge of overseeing tax-exempt organizations, are civil servants whose firing must go through a process removed from the White House.