Paul L. Caron
Dean





Monday, October 28, 2013

The IRS Scandal, Day 172

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Wall St. Cheat Sheet:  Here’s Why the GOP Still Hate the IRS:

Last week we discussed just how much American’s don’t trust their government post-shutdown. Still, there was a happy aside noting how much they do like their government agencies — especially the Centers for Disease Control (at 75% positive), NASA (at 73%), the Department of Defense (at 72%), the Veterans Administration (at 68%), and the Department of Homeland Security (at 66%) — according to the Pew Research Center.

The IRS was the lone recipient of majority holding reproach with only 44% positive ratings and 51% critical. Of those that held the IRS in good regards, very few of them were Republicans — a mere 23%. The positive views remaining were taken up by a much larger 65% of Democrats and 40% of independents.

But why the angry Republican tilt to these findings? A likely explanation lies in a Scandal earlier this month that centered around accusations that the IRS had been targeting conservative Republican groups. On October 9, the Judicial Watch — a conservative lobbying group — filed a suit against the agency with Watch president, Tom Fitton, quoted as saying they intended to “cut through the Obama administration cover-up of its IRS scandal,” according to the Washington Times.

“One of the most pressing questions, of course, is, ‘What did the president know and when did he know it?’ We know that former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman and his political aide, Jonathan Davis, visited the White House hundreds of times during the Obama IRS witch hunt. This may help explain why the IRS is now stonewalling our FOIA requests and forced us to go to federal court,” said Fitton.

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2013/10/the-irs-scandal-11.html

IRS News, IRS Scandal, Tax | Permalink

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