Governor Jay Nixon (D) has announced that Brian Long has resigned as Director of the Missouri Department of Revenue (DOR). The resignation is effective immediately.
“I want to thank Brian [Long] for his service to the state of Missouri in heading up this department, and wish him well in his future endeavors,” Nixon said in a statement regarding the resignation. In addition, Nixon's Press Secretary, Scott Holste, said that Long voluntarily stepped down and that he was neither asked nor encouraged to resign.
Long's departure follows weeks of controversy surrounding the agency’s handling of documents for driver’s license and conceal-carry-weapons (CCW) applicants. He 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 the agency had compiled the entire list of the state’s 163,000 CCW holders for the Missouri State Highway Patrol. The Patrol then provided it to the Social Security Administration for an investigation it was conducting.
Kurt Schaefer (R, Columbia) chairs the Missouri 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," Schaefer said. "I hope (the Nixon Administration doesn't think) that...this is gonna end it, because it doesn’t end anything. It doesn’t change the policy, (and) 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, having been named DOR Director last December. Deputy Director John Mollenkamp will serve as Acting Director until a permanent replacement is named.
Nixon has also denied that the department was sending the documents and a lawsuit was filed on the issue.
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