TaxProf Blog

Paul L. Caron
Dean




Thursday, December 18, 2014

The IRS Scandal, Day 588

IRS Logo 2Washington Times editorial:  Obama’s IRS Faces Scrutiny With Republican-led Congress:

The corruption of the Internal Revenue Service is still under investigation, but the public has learned a lot already: The IRS targeted conservative and tea party groups for extra scrutiny and harassment, Lois G. Lerner tried to hide behind the Fifth Amendment to avoid prosecution for violating the rights of taxpayers, and the president of the United States assured one and all that there was not even a “smidgen of corruption” at the agency when he knew better.

What the public did not know until recently was that the White House requested and received from the IRS the tax records of 2,500 taxpayers for White House inspection. President Obama is not the first president to try to use the IRS against his enemies, but he is the first to do it wholesale. President Kennedy shared tax information with The Washington Post about Sen. Barry Goldwater and senior members of his 1964 presidential campaign team. They were subjected to grueling audits. President Nixon tried to get the IRS to go after his enemies when he faced impeachment. ...

To argue that this is part of a cover-up is to argue the obvious. The arrogance of a government that abuses the rights of its citizens, ignoring specific laws to do so, must be held to account like everyone else, and if justice is done a flurry of subpoenas for a number of White House and IRS officials will follow soon after the Christmas holidays. Congress has disregarded oversight duties in this matter, and soon there will be a new Congress and the 114th Congress will have an opportunity to take these duties seriously.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/12/the-irs-3.html

IRS News, IRS Scandal, Tax | Permalink

Comments

It is trivial to redact the records in terms of effort and time, that the Obama administration is preventing this from happening is a strong indicator of inappropriate behavior. Let's not forget, this is the same crew that claimed they provided all of Lerner's emails, then a year later is caught in a lie that they didn't have all of the emails. Next they claimed that they looked everywhere for the missing emails only to be caught in another lie because they didn't even bother to look for them. Now, we are to believe Obama again? How many times must we have the football pulled out by Lucy?

Posted by: wodun | Dec 18, 2014 1:14:24 PM

If these people don't get publicly disgraced and go to prison then this is only the beginning. If they get away with this without punishment, there will be no stopping the weaponized bureaucracy.

Posted by: Michael | Dec 18, 2014 8:07:11 AM

We can only hope some kind of justice is done for Americans who were asked to share the "content of their prayers" with the IRS. I also hope that the EPA, FBI and any other organizations that piggy-backed on the original IRS investigations get called in. Who coordinated these bureaucracies to go after the "True the Vote" folks in Texas? Somebody must have been in charge.

Posted by: VoteOutIncumbents | Dec 18, 2014 8:05:24 AM

Here we go again. Now the 2,043 PAGES of documents generated by TIGTA in its investigation of ALLEGED wrongful transmittals of tax return information to the WH have morphed into the illegal and corrupt transmission of the tax returns of 2,500 taxpayers from the IRS to the WH. This doesn’t even rise to the level of shoddy journalism.

Posted by: Publius Novus | Dec 18, 2014 6:12:52 AM