Word: probed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...House Commerce, Consumer and Monetary Affairs subcommittee in what could be the most extensive and embarrassing examination of the IRS since Watergate. While the subcommittee has not discovered the widespread bribes, kickbacks and blackmail that led to an overhaul of the IRS in the 1950s, its yearlong probe has unearthed evidence of disturbing misconduct: several instances of alleged wrongdoing by high-level IRS officials in the past five years and an attempted cover-up by the agency's image-conscious leaders...
...heart of the probe are two perplexing questions. Have post-Watergate reforms designed to shield the IRS from political abuse unintentionally allowed corruption to flourish by exempting the agency from proper oversight? And is the agency, headless since Commissioner Lawrence Gibbs resigned at the height of the tax season last March, using those reforms to prevent the subcommittee from delving into the wrongdoing...
There is certainly much to question in Saranow's handling of tax cases that the IRS brought against two rivals of Guess. In 1985 Saranow, acting on a tip from Guess, launched a criminal probe of Jeff Hamilton, Inc., a Los Angeles- based company that once made clothes under a license from Guess. A year later Saranow, again relying on information supplied by Guess, got IRS officials in New York City to begin a criminal case against Jordache. At the time, Jordache's founders, the Nakash brothers, were embroiled in a bitter dispute with the Marciano brothers, who founded Guess...
...late 1986, after the IRS dropped a tax case against Guess that had been initiated by Jordache, top agency officials began to investigate Saranow's possible role. The probe intensified in 1987, when Saranow's office dropped charges against Jeff Hamilton only days after that firm withdrew a lawsuit it had filed against Guess. Meanwhile, the IRS rejected Saranow's request to take a leave of absence and work for Guess, as his deputy, Howard Emirhanian, had done a year earlier. Saranow was cleared of charges of wrongdoing...
...intention to "sit tight and await Soviet concessions," he went on to outline an approach that sounded exactly like that: "Our policy must be . . . to test the application of Soviet 'new thinking' again and again" with a view to determining "whether the new thinking is real once we probe behind the slogans...