Lois Lerner, an Internal Revenue Service official at the centre of the scandal over the agency’s extra scrutiny of conservative groups, was put on administrative leave on Thursday after she refused to resign, a senator said.
Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa said new acting IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel asked for Lerner’s resignation, Reuters reported.
An IRS spokesman declined to comment on Lerner’s status, citing privacy concerns. However, an internal memo supplied by the agency named Lerner’s replacement.
An aide to Grassley said Werfel spoke with Grassley’s office on Thursday afternoon and conveyed the information.
A bipartisan chorus in Congress had been calling for her to go. Democratic Senator Carl Levin and Republican Senator John McCain had written to Werfel earlier on Thursday calling for her to be removed.
The move comes one day after a defiant Lerner refused to answer questions during a House of Representatives panel hearing into why workers in a Cincinnati, Ohio, field office of the IRS in early 2010 began targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax exempt status.
Lerner oversaw the tax-exempt division.
Her lawyer, William Taylor, did not immediately respond to a request for comment late on Thursday.
Lerner is seen as a key figure in the unfolding scandal that has spawned a Justice Department criminal probe and become a distraction for President Barack Obama as he pursues an ambitious second-term agenda.
Three congressional hearings over the past week have failed to reveal who at the IRS was responsible for the targeting that occurred for roughly 18 months.
On Wednesday, Lerner denied she had done anything wrong, but asserted her constitutional right against self-incrimination.
House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa has accused Lerner of providing “false or misleading information” to his committee on four occasions last year.
Lerner was the official who first publicly acknowledged the targeting by responding to a planted question about the topic at an American Bar Association conference on May 10.
The admission came before a Treasury Department inspector general report found that workers in the Cincinnati office used “inappropriate criteria” such as the terms “Tea Party” and “Patriots” to target the applications of conservative groups for intense scrutiny.