I.R.S."s Lois Lerner, Who Refused to Testify, Is Suspended WASHINGTON - Lois Lerner, the head of the Internal Revenue Service's division on tax-exempt organizations, was put on administrative leave Thursday, a day after she invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to testify before a House committee investigating her division's targeting of conservative groups. Lois Lerner of the Internal Revenue Service leaving a House hearing on Wednesday on the agency's focus on conservative groups. Lawmakers from both parties said Thursday that senior I.R.S. officials had requested Ms. Lerner's resignation but that she refused, forcing them to put her on leave instead. Whether her suspension will lead to dismissal was unclear, given Civil Service rules that govern federal employment. "The I.R.S. owes it to taxpayers to resolve her situation quickly," said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. "She shouldn't be in limbo indefinitely on the taxpayers" dime." The move to put Ms. Lerner on leave came minutes after Senators Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, released a letter to the new acting I.R.S. commissioner, Daniel I. Werfel, demanding her immediate suspension for what they said was her failure to disclose information to their Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. "Given the serious failure by Ms. Lerner to disclose to this subcommittee key information on topics that the subcommittee was investigating, we have lost confidence in her ability to fulfill her duties as director of exempt organizations at the I.R.S.," wrote Mr. Levin and Mr. McCain. If Ms. Lerner is dismissed, she will be the third senior I.R.S. official to lose his or her job in the scandal. The acting commissioner, Steven T. Miller, was dismissed, and Ms. Lerner's supervisor, Joseph H. Grant, director of the tax-exempt and government entities division, is retiring. On May 10, Ms. Lerner delivered an awkward apology to Tea Party and other conservative groups whose applications for tax exemptions had been singled out for special scrutiny. At that time, she said she had learned of the targeting in 2012, when Tea Party groups publicly accused the I.R.S. of mistreatment. But days later, a Treasury inspector general's audit appeared to make it clear that she had known of the effort before then and had tried to reshape it. Lawmakers accused her of lying. On Wednesday, appearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Ms. Lerner gave an opening statement in which she said she had not lied to Congress and had done nothing wrong. She then invoked her constitutional right against self-incrimination and declined to testify. But Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, the committee's chairman, said that with her opening statement, Ms. Lerner had lost the right not to testify. He said he was considering calling her back. "Everything she said under oath is subject to perjury," Mr. Issa said. This is not one of those things where you can put the genie back in the bottle. Ken Corbin, a deputy director in the I.R.S."s wage and investment division, was named acting director of Ms. Lerner's division.