Brian Long stepped down Monday as Director of the Missouri Department of Revenue, after weeks of controversy surrounding the agency’s handling of documents for driver’s license and conceal-carry-weapons applicants.
Long had testified at a number of hearings that the Department of Revenue was scanning source documents as a means of combatting fraud, and that no one’s information was being stored in a database for the Department of Homeland Security, or otherwise being sent to the federal government.
Then news broke last week that DOR had compiled the entire list of conceal-carry holders for the Missouri Highway Patrol, which sent it twice to an investigator for the Social Security Administration.
Republican Senate members have sharply criticized Long for DOR’s scanning policies and for compiling the CCW list. Republican Kurt Schaefer of Columbia chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, which has been examining the Department of Revenue’s actions.
“Simply throwing the Director under the bus isn’t gonna be a fix for the policy problems that raised all this in the first place. Well, I hope this isn’t the thing that this is what they did and this is gonna end it, because it doesn’t end anything,” Schaefer said. “It doesn’t change the policy, it still doesn’t answer the questions that are still out there on why this happened in the first place.”
Long had only been on the job for about three months.
John Mollenkamp will serve as Acting Director until a permanent replacement is named.
