Taxable Talk

The scandal involving the targeting of conservative groups continues to grow with new revelations. ABC obtained a timeline (purportedly from the soon to be released TIGTA report) which shows that the targeting began in 2010, not as Ms. Lerner of the IRS said in 2011. That’s bad as Ms. Lerner’s apology appears to be wrong.

Unfortunately for the IRS (and the Obama Administration) there’s more–a lot more. Next, we find that the IRS sent confidential applications to a liberal-oriented group according to that group. Amazingly enough, this included nine organizations that hadn’t been approved. Those applications for 501(c)(4) status aren’t supposed to be released but they were. And they were published by ProPublica.

Next, we discover that this wasn’t confined to the Cincinnati Service Center. The Washington Post has an update that hits close to home for me:

IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea-party-affiliated groups, the documents show.

We next discover an allegation that there’s a secret group working on conservative organizations. Normally, I wouldn’t believe this. However, I am forced to remember, “Sometimes the cynics are right.” Attorney Dan Backer alleges that an IRS analyst told him that there’s such a group.

“More than a year ago, one of these guys, really a slip of the tongue, [said] ‘Yeah we have this new working group that’s really looking at all these conservative organizations,’” Backer said. “And that’s when we knew it was gonna be a problem.”

We have the National Organization for Marriage’s lawsuit against the IRS alleging that IRS employees revealed the confidential portion of their Form 990 filing. (Some portions of Form 990 are released; however, some portions do remain confidential. The list of donors to a non-profit is listed on Schedule B of Form 990; that is considered confidential.)

Lost in all this is another black eye for the IRS: The GAO said that the IRS has 60 deficiencies in their internal controls. I guess the news stories of the day might make one believe that’s the case.

At this point in time, the paranoid are believing that there’s an “Enemies List” and that higher-ups are organizing IRS vendettas against conservatives and conservative groups; and that the Enemies List comes from higher-ups in Washington, DC. One week ago, I would not have believed someone who told me, “The IRS deliberately targeted conservative groups and this had gone on for three years and it goes up to the IRS Chief Counsel’s Office.” Yet that absolutely appears to be the case. I’m forced to admit that the paranoid in this case could be correct. I don’t know if we’re heading toward a repeat of what happened with Watergate, but I am certain that there will be a lot of tough questions for a lot of individuals at the IRS.

Tags: IRS.Scandal

This entry was posted on Monday, May 13th, 2013 at 8:33 pm and is filed under IRS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.