Paul L. Caron
Dean





Thursday, December 10, 2015

The IRS Scandal, Day 945

IRS Logo 2Forbes: National Organization For Marriage Denied Attorney Fees In IRS Lawsuit, by Peter J. Reilly:

It looks like the National Organization for Marriage has come to the end of the line in its hope for a big payday from the IRS for the unauthorized disclosure of the Schedule B (donor list) attached to its 2008 Form 990. Form 990 becomes public (The easiest way to find one is on guidestar.org), but the donor list is not publically disclosed.  The Fourth Circuit upheld a district court decision denying NOM attorney fees in its suit against the IRS.  IRS had admitted that it was wrong in releasing the Schedule B and settled with a payment of $50,000.  NOM was seeking $691,025.05 in fees.

The disclosure caused a bit of a stir, because it showed that a Mitt Romney related entity had given money to NOM.  Also, according to this story, two years after the disclosure Brian Eich was pressured to step down as CEO of Mozilla because of his $1,000 donation that was on the list.  The Mozilla story was Day 331 of Paul Caron’s IRS Scandal coverage.  The original story of the disclosure was covered by the Tax Prof on April 13, 2012 over a year before the launching of the scandal series. ...

The NOM disclosure issue wove its way into the IRS scandal narrative.  The core scandal is the delay and intrusive questions in processing the exemption applications of Tea Party and similar groups.  Earlier this week Paul Caron on The IRS Scandal, Day 943 noted that Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago Law School had queried his readers “Has there really been an IRS scandal going for nearly three years?” Professor Caron maintains that he will keep with the coverage as long as there is something out there.  He did indicate that there is not much in the queue right now, so there is some chance the series might go dark at least for a while.

In a private exchange with another blogger on that post, I noted that the NOM litigation was still outstanding.  So that’s one down.  I’m pretty sure that the Z Street litigation is chugging on.  Although Judicial Watch has not added to its IRS scandal blog since Labor Day, I think it is likely that they have some more cats to pull out of the bag.

I wonder whether the IRS scandal will go down in history like the Dreyfus Affair or the Sacco-Vanzetti trial or if it will just fade away.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/12/the-irs-scandal-day-945.html

IRS News, IRS Scandal, Tax | Permalink

Comments

As long as I live, I am committed to doing everything I can donto make sure the IRS's abuse of Americans based on their political ideology like what we would expect from the Russian government is NOT FORGOTTEN.

Posted by: Bittman | Dec 10, 2015 7:31:44 PM

There must be a backstory to this. They settled for $50,000, but didn't settle the attorney's fee issue then. And now the judge has decided, correctly it looks like, that with such a small settlement NOM wasn't clearly "prevailing".

Posted by: Eric Rasmusen | Dec 10, 2015 2:40:47 PM

Watergate was an amateur one-off compared to the IRS abuses of power. We must not let this malfeasance go unpunished.

Posted by: Forrest | Dec 10, 2015 10:53:47 AM