The IRS Scandal, Day 741

National Review, Conservative Group Uncovers New Roots of IRS Scandal:

A group of lawyers who have been investigating the origins of the IRS scandal for the past year-and-a-half say they’ve uncovered the real roots of the IRS scandal — and they’ll surprise both liberals and conservatives alike. The group, Cause of Action, which has subpoenaed thousands of pages of documents from the agency and is still embroiled in litigation with it, says the targeting of conservative groups resulted as much from IRS personnel merely following the instructions laid out in their employee handbook, the Internal Revenue Manual, as from any political bias at the top.

When the scandal broke nearly two years ago, the IRS and the Obama administration pointed the finger at a few bad apples in the agency’s Cincinnati office. The agency’s inspector general blamed the inappropriate targeting of tea-party groups on the “ineffective management” of top bureaucrats. Many reporters, particularly on the right, including here at National Review, concluded that top D.C. official Lois Lerner and her colleagues in the IRS’s Exempt Organizations office had orchestrated events from the outset.

Dan Epstein, executive director of Cause of Action, is a former attorney and investigator for the House Oversight Committee. He and his team, a group of 13 attorneys funded by the Koch brothers’ sprawling network of donors, say none of these stories fully explain what happened at the IRS between 2010 and 2014 and that, in fact, the targeting was baked in the cake. That is, the Internal Revenue Manual, the handbook by which IRS employees are required to abide, mandates the sort of scrutiny that delayed the processing of the applications of hundreds of conservative nonprofit organizations. Cause of Action has laid out its case in a confidential, 35-page memo obtained by National Review. They concluded that many of the IRS officials involved in the scandal were just following the rules. ...

Epstein’s team at Cause of Action is adamant that most of the IRS personnel involved in the scandal executed their duties properly. “Clearly, Jack Koester, John Shafer, and Cindy Thomas executed their employee obligations precisely,” their report says. “Indeed, in the course of merely two business days, the employees in the Exempt Organizations group accurately elevated this Tea Party issue as ‘newsworthy’ or having the ‘potential to become newsworthy.’”

The team’s conclusion: The Internal Revenue Manual must be fundamentally reformed in order to prevent future targeting. “While there are certainly complex or new issues that would warrant or even require an employee to elevate the issue to a manager, the IRS’s desire to be portrayed in a positive light by the media is certainly not one of those issues,” they say.

Tax-law experts agree. Craig Engle, the founder of the bipartisan political-law group at the Washington law firm Arent Fox, says that allowing IRS personnel, ultimately at the national level, to determine what issues are newsworthy creates a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. The Internal Revenue Manual as it stands now virtually “requires the national office to do something” about cases it deems newsworthy, Engle says. As a result, he says, the IRS “created a task for itself that it would be impossible to administer evenhandedly, let alone on a bipartisan basis. It’s no wonder they got caught.”

• The IRS Scandal, Day 740 (May 19, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 739 (May 18, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 738 (May 17, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 737 (May 16, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 736 (May 15, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 735 (May 14, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 734 (May 13, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 733 (May 12, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 732 (May 11, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 731 (May 10, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Two Years And Counting (May 9, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 729 (May 8, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 728 (May 7, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 727 (May 6, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 726 (May 5, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 725 (May 4, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 724 (May 3, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 723 (May 2, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 722 (May 1, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 721 (Apr. 30, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 720 (Apr. 29, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 719 (Apr. 28, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 718 (Apr. 27, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 717 (Apr. 26, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 716 (Apr. 25, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 715 (Apr. 24, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 714 (Apr. 23, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 713 (Apr. 22, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 712 (Apr. 21, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 711 (Apr. 20, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 710 (Apr. 19, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 709 (Apr. 18, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 708 (Apr. 17, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 707 (Apr. 16, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 706 (Apr. 15, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 705 (Apr. 14, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 704 (Apr. 13, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 703 (Apr. 12, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 702 (Apr. 11, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 701 (Apr. 10, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 601-700 (Dec. 31, 2014 - April 9, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 501-600 (Sept. 22, 2014-Dec. 30, 2014)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 401-500 (June 14, 2014 - Sept. 21,2014)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 301-400 (Mar. 6, 2014 - June 13, 2014)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 201-300 (Nov. 26, 2013 - Mar. 5, 2014)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 101-200 (Aug. 18, 2013 - Nov. 25, 2013)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 1-100 (May 10, 2013 - Aug. 17, 2013)