The IRS Scandal, Day 1612: Inspector General Debunks Ideological Targeting Of Conservative Groups By The IRS

New York Times, In Targeting Political Groups, I.R.S. Crossed Party Lines:

A federal watchdog investigating whether the Internal Revenue Service unfairly targeted conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status said that the agency also scrutinized organizations associated with liberal causes from 2004 to 2013.

The findings by the Treasury Department’s inspector general mark the end of a political firestorm that embroiled the I.R.S. in controversy, led to the ouster of its commissioner and prompted accusations the tax collection agency was being used as a political weapon by the Obama administration.

The exhaustive report, which examined nine years worth of applications for tax-exempt status, comes after a similar audit in 2013 found that groups with conservative names like “Tea Party,” “patriot” or “9/12” were unfairly targeted for further review.

The new report found that the I.R.S. was also inappropriately targeting progressive-leaning groups. While the investigation does not specify the political affiliations of the groups, names that were flagged included the words “Progressive,” “Occupy,” “Green Energy,” and Acorn — the acronym for the now defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ...

Ahead of the 2014 midterm elections, Republicans regularly used the scandal to bludgeon Democrats and paint the Obama administration as corrupt. But now it appears that the I.R.S. was an equal offender. “This report shows the I.R.S. deep scrutiny of political groups is in fact bipartisan, it is liberal and conservative groups that the I.R.S. has been targeting,” said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

Rather than condemn the I.R.S. actions, Democrats on Thursday celebrated the findings as evidence that Republicans were wrong to claim bias at the I.R.S. Democrats had previously been critical of the 2013 Treasury report since it only looked at two years of applications. “After years of baseless claims and false accusations it is my hope Republicans will finally put an end to this witch hunt and admit that their attacks on the I.R.S. were nothing but political grandstanding on behalf of special interests at the expense of American taxpayers,” said Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

Republicans, however, are not prepared to let the I.R.S. off the hook and seized on the report as evidence that the agency must be reformed. “This report reinforces what government watchdogs and congressional investigators have confirmed time and time again: Bureaucrats at the I.R.S., such as Lois Lerner, arbitrarily and haphazardly administered the tax code and targeted taxpayers based on political ideology,” said Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the Republican chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. “It’s no wonder the American people have lost faith in the I.R.S.”

The controversy over political targeting at the I.R.S. was the genesis of many congressional hearings and probes, and it has continued to haunt its current commissioner, John Koskinen, whom Mr. Obama tapped to stabilize the agency. As recently as April, House members called for the firing of Mr. Koskinen for the “gross mishandling” of its investigation into the targeting of political groups. Despite the uproar from Republicans, President Trump has not taken any steps to fire Mr. Koskinen, whose term ends next month.

Washington Post, Four Years Later, the IRS Tea Party Scandal Looks Very Different. It May Not Even Be a Scandal:

It all seemed to add up. At least it did then.

The Internal Revenue Service, according to outraged Republicans and many media accounts at the time, targeted tea party organizations and other conservative nonprofit groups that were seeking tax-exempt status between 2010 and 2012. Critics said the tax agency had subjected the targeted groups to extra scrutiny, questioning and long delays, largely because their names suggested they would be political opponents of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

The allegations formed one of the best-known scandals of former president Barack Obama’s administration and led to months of congressional hearings, official investigations and damning news coverage.

Now, it seems, it wasn’t so simple. ...

The new finding suggests Republicans and the media provided an incomplete or even misleading account of what the IRS was up to when it was reviewing political organizations that sought tax-exempt status. While not of the order of the news media’s credulous (and flawed) reporting about supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the U.S. invasion in 2003, the report offers a check on the prevailing narrative of the time.

It may also offer a measure of vindication to Obama, at least according to one of his senior advisers. “The Obama administration was often accused of Nixonian wrongdoing,” Eric Schultz, the former president’s spokesman and a deputy White House press secretary under him, said Thursday. “At some point, I lost track of how many Watergates we had. But we live in an environment where the more hyperbolic your allegation is, the more likely it will get headlines, no matter its veracity. This report substantiates our argument that our White House did not politicize the IRS, but those allegations, A1 material at the time, have lived online for four years and now that the public has moved on, they’re proven false.” ...

The issue might have become part of what Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan has called the “scandal attention cycle” — the rapid surge of attention as reporters race to cover an issue followed by a similar decline as the news media loses interest. “The problem is that it often takes time for the full set of facts to come out,” Nyhan has written. “By that time, the story is old news and the more complex or ambiguous details that often emerge are buried or ignored.”

Philip Hackney (LSU), IRS ‘Targeted’ Liberal Organizations and After All These Years TIGTA is Still Wrong:

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) just issued a new report four years and five months after rebuking the IRS for using “inappropriate” criteria to select applications for tax exempt status for scrutiny. In the first report, TIGTA rebuked the IRS for pulling the applications of conservative leaning organizations for greater scrutiny.

This time it considers the fact that the IRS over a period of 10 years used liberal leaning names such as ACORN, Emerge, and Progressive as criteria for pulling applications for greater scrutiny. This resulted in the IRS applying greater scrutiny to these organizations. Some might say the IRS targeted these organizations. Those organizations appear to have faced long wait times as well, and sometimes some questions of limited merit.

I write this piece to make two points: (1) had this information been in the initial report, I don’t think we would have had the “scandal” that shook the IRS and the political world of the time; and (2) the TIGTA report built its primary claim on a garbled faux legal postulate. The original report did terrible damage to the IRS and individuals by failing on both of these fronts.

Leandra Lederman (Indiana), The Real IRS Scandal:

[T]he new TIGTA report “identified 146 cases in which the IRS examined groups for suspicion of engaging in disallowed political activity using those criteria.” This finding is not a surprise. The fact that IRS employees were using keywords to identify progressive as well as conservative organizations doing too much political activity to qualify under 501(c)(4) should have been clear to anyone who dug into the public documents. But it wasn’t the message that the House Oversight Committee — and thus many media stories — disseminated. The real scandal was the d amage the resulting witch hunt did to the IRS. I wrote about that in [IRS Reform: Politics As Usual?, 7 Colum. J. Tax L. 36 (2016)] and in a related, short article I published in Tax Notes, The IRS, Politics, and Income Inequality, [150 Tax Notes 1329 (Mar. 14, 2016),] focused in part on IRS underfunding. I hope that TIGTA’s new report helps set the record straight.

• Accounting Today, IRS May Have Targeted the Left, Too
• Anerican Thinker, The Left Crows About Lois Lerner's IRS Now Being 'Evenhanded'
• Daily Intelligencer, The Debunked IRS Targeting Scandal Shows There Is No Sane Wing of the GOP
• The Hill, Dems: Watchdog Report Confirms IRS Scrutiny Wasn't Politically Motivated
• The Maddow Blog, The Demise of the IRS ‘Scandal’ and the Need for Accountability
• Media Matters, Right-Wing Media “Scandals” Never End, They Just Fade Away: A New Report Should End the Conservative Fixation on the "IRS Scandal." It Probably Won't.
• Mother Jones, After Four Years, IRS Finally Confirms There Was No Targeting of Tea Party Groups
• Nonprofit Quarterly, About That Nonprofit IRS Tax Scandal … Never Mind!
• Politico, Audit Indicates Liberal Nonprofits Also Got Extra IRS Scrutiny
• Wall Street Journal, IRS Scrutiny Akin to Tea-Party Controversy Also Ensnared Some Left-Leaning Groups, Inspector General Says
• Washington Post, What the Bogus IRS ‘Scandal’ Tells Us About Republican Corruption
• Washington Times, Audit Reveals IRS Targeting of Liberal Groups, Tough Scrutiny of Tea Party and Other Conservatives

• The IRS Scandal, Day 1611: TIGTA Report, Review Of Selected Criteria Used To Identify Tax-Exempt Applications For Review (Oct. 6, 2017)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 1610: Inspector General Says IRS Gave Extra Scrutiny To Liberal Groups, Undermining GOP Claims Of Ideological Targeting Of Conservative Groups By IRS (Oct. 5, 2017)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 1501-1600 (June 18, 2017 - Oct. 4, 2017)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 1401-1500 (Mar. 10, 2017 - June 17, 2017)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 1301-1400 (Nov. 30, 2016 - Mar. 9, 2017)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 1201-1300 (Aug. 22, 2016 - Nov. 29, 2016)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 1101-1200 (May 14, 2016 - Aug. 21, 2016)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 1001-1100 (Feb. 4, 2016 - May 13, 2016)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 901-1000 (Oct. 27, 2015 - Feb. 3, 2016)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 801-900 (July 19, 2015 - Oct. 26, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 701-800 (April 10, 2015 - July 18, 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)