Paul L. Caron
Dean





Friday, August 7, 2015

The IRS Scandal, Day 820

IRS Logo 2New York Times, Senate Report Cites I.R.S. Mismanagement in Targeting of Tea Party Groups:

A Senate committee on Wednesday closed a two-year investigation with unanimous agreement that mismanagement at the Internal Revenue Service led it to improperly target conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. But a report by the panel did not suggest that any laws were broken, and Republicans and Democrats were divided over whether White House politics was behind the problems.

“This bipartisan investigation shows gross mismanagement at the highest levels of the I.R.S. and confirms an unacceptable truth: that the I.R.S. is prone to abuse,” Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement after his panel voted behind closed doors to release the report of more than 400 pages.

An I.R.S. official acknowledged the agency had singled out nonprofit applicants with “Tea Party” or “patriots” in their titles.

Mr. Hatch added that “the committee found evidence that the administration’s political agenda guided the I.R.S.’s actions with respect to their treatment of conservative groups.” But the committee’s senior Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, said in the same news release that the inquiry had found “pure bureaucratic mismanagement without any evidence of political interference.”

“Groups on both sides of the political spectrum were treated equally in their efforts to secure tax-exempt status,” Mr. Wyden said.

The two parties’ differences of interpretation left them where they began more than two years ago, after Republicans and conservative groups first accused the I.R.S. of singling out applications of Tea Party-affiliated organizations seeking tax-exempt status for extra scrutiny and delays. Even so, the overall bipartisanship of the conduct and the conclusions of the Finance Committee investigation was notable given both the charged nature of the allegations and the more partisan parallel inquiries in the Republican-controlled House.

“Our investigation found that from 2010 to 2013, I.R.S. management was delinquent in its responsibility to provide effective control, guidance and direction over the processing of applications for tax-exempt status filed by Tea Party and other political advocacy organizations,” the committee concluded.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/08/the-irs-scandal-day-82.html

IRS News, IRS Scandal, Tax | Permalink

Comments

Of course the Democrats on the committee would refuse to admit laws were broken. Modern liberals/Democrats openly despise the most core principle of a democracy - the Rule of Law. For them, laws are just tools to suppress their opposition - conservatives and libertarians. The behavior of the Democratic Party leadership and every single Democrat in the U.S. Senate in 1998 during the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton for his felonies was comphrensive proof of that to any honest individual. And soon, "Publis Novus" will show up here to demonstrate once again how Democrats object to any documentation of their despicable ideology...

Posted by: Andrew Russell | Aug 7, 2015 8:50:18 AM

What a crock. This was a management issue? The Washington Cartel has spoken and that is what passes for our republic in 2015. The law is meaningless to them; the law is their inside joke. We are fools and they know it.

Posted by: richard | Aug 7, 2015 8:21:27 AM