IRS Selectively Targeting

[heironymouspasparagus]

If you are paying attention to how this is playing out, it is much bigger than just two agents.  Again, see my post above about the president's half-brother's foundation getting it's application approved in record time as well as retroactive for the two prior years when he was illegally soliciting and accepting contributions while claiming to be an NPO. 

That is unless you only get your news from MSNBC or the lamestream.

Will look into it more this weekend - last 4 days have been "out of touch" with news, so yeah, I am probably way behind the curve on this right now.

[RecycleMichael]

Pardon me for being ignorant on this...but I kind of assumed that every administration uses the IRS as a weapon. Are you sure that this is the first time it has ever happened?

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/14/when_the_irs_targeted_liberals/

Under George W. Bush, it went after the NAACP, Greenpeace and even a liberal church

While few are defending the Internal Revenue Service for targeting some 300 conservative groups, there are two critical pieces of context missing from the conventional wisdom on the "scandal." First, at least from what we know so far, the groups were not targeted in a political vendetta — but rather were executing a makeshift enforcement test (an ugly one, mind you) for IRS employees tasked with separating political groups not allowed to claim tax-exempt status, from bona fide social welfare organizations. Employees are given almost zero official guidance on how to do that, so they went after Tea Party groups because those seemed like they might be political. Keep in mind, the commissioner of the IRS at the time was a Bush appointee.

The second is that while this is the first time this kind of thing has become a national scandal, it's not the first time such activity has occurred.

"I wish there was more GOP interest when I raised the same issue during the Bush administration, where they audited a progressive church in my district in what look liked a very selective way," California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said on MSNBC Monday. "I found only one Republican, [North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones], that would join me in calling for an investigation during the Bush administration. I'm glad now that the GOP has found interest in this issue and it ought to be a bipartisan concern."

The well-known church, All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena, became a bit of a cause célèbre on the left after the IRS threatened to revoke the church's tax-exempt status over an anti-Iraq War sermon the Sunday before the 2004 election. "Jesus [would say], 'Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine,'" rector George Regas said from the dais.

The church, which said progressive activism was in its "DNA," hired a powerful Washington lawyer and enlisted the help of Schiff, who met with the commissioner of the IRS twice and called for a Government Accountability Office investigation, saying the IRS audit violated the First Amendment and was unduly targeting a political opponent of the Bush administration. "My client is very concerned that the close coordination undertaken by the IRS allowed partisan political concerns to direct the course of the All Saints examination," church attorney Marcus Owens, who is widely considered one of the country's leading experts on this area of the law, said at the time. In 2007, the IRS closed the case, decreeing that the church violated rules preventing political intervention, but it did not revoke its nonprofit status.

And while All Saints came under the gun, conservative churches across the country were helping to mobilize voters for Bush with little oversight. In 2006, citing the precedent of All Saints, "a group of religious leaders accused the Internal Revenue Service yesterday of playing politics by ignoring its complaint that two large churches in Ohio are engaging in what it says are political activities, in violation of the tax code," the New York Times reported at the time. The churches essentially campaigned for a Republican gubernatorial candidate, they alleged, and even flew him on one of their planes.

Meanwhile, Citizens for Ethics in Washington filed two ethics complaints against a church in Minnesota. "You know we can't publicly endorse as a church and would not for any candidate, but I can tell you personally that I'm going to vote for Michele Bachmann," pastor Mac Hammond of the Living Word Christian Center in Minnesota said in 2006 before welcoming her to the church. The IRS opened an audit into the church, but it went nowhere after the church appealed the audit on a technicality.

And it wasn't just churches. In 2004, the IRS went after the NAACP, auditing the nation's oldest civil rights group after its chairman criticized President Bush for being the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to address the organization. "They are saying if you criticize the president we are going to take your tax exemption away from you," then-chairman Julian Bond said. "It's pretty obvious that the complainant was someone who doesn't believe George Bush should be criticized, and it's obvious of their response that the IRS believes this, too."

In a letter to the IRS, Democratic Reps. Charles Rangel, Pete Stark and John Conyers wrote: "It is obvious that the timing of this IRS examination is nothing more than an effort to intimidate the members of the NAACP, and the communities the organization represents, in their get-out-the-vote effort nationwide."

Then, in 2006, the Wall Street Journal broke the story of a how a little-known pressure group called Public Interest Watch — which received 97 percent of its funds from Exxon Mobile one year — managed to get the IRS to open an investigation into Greenpeace. Greenpeace had labeled Exxon Mobil the "No. 1 climate criminal." The IRS acknowledged its audit was initiated by Public Interest Watch and threatened to revoke Greenpeace's tax-exempt status, but closed the investigation three months later.

As the Journal reporter, Steve Stecklow, later said in an interview, "This comes against a backdrop where a number of conservative groups have been attacking nonprofits and NGOs over their tax-exempt status. There have been hearings on Capitol Hill. There have been a number of conservative groups in Washington who have been quite critical."

Indeed, the year before that, the Senate held a hearing on nonprofits' political activity. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, the then-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the IRS needed better enforcement, but also "legislative changes" to better define the lines between politics and social welfare, since they had not been updated in "a generation." Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the IRS has defined 501(c)4′s sufficiently to this day, leaving the door open for IRS auditors to make up their own, discriminatory rules.

Those cases mostly involved 501(c)3 organizations, which live in a different section of the tax code for real charities like hospitals and schools. The rules are much stronger and better developed for (c)3′s, in part because they've been around longer. But with "social welfare" (c)4 groups, the kind of political activity we saw in 2010 and 2012 is so unprecedented that you get cases like Emerge America, a progressive nonprofit that trains Democratic female candidates for public office. The group has chapters across the country, but in 2011, chapters in Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada were denied 501(c)4 tax-exempt status. Leaders called the situation "bizarre" because in the five years Nevada had waited for approval, the Kentucky chapter was approved, only for the other three to be denied.

A former IRS official told the New York Times that probably meant the applications were sent to different offices, which use slightly different standards. Different offices within the same organization that are supposed to impose the exact same rules in a consistent manner have such uneven conceptions of where to draw the line at a political group, that they can approve one organization and then deny its twin in a different state.

All of these stories suggest that while concern with the IRS posture toward conservative groups now may be merited, to fully understand the situation requires a bit of context and history.

Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald. More Alex Seitz-Wald.

[Hoss]

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/14/when_the_irs_targeted_liberals/

Under George W. Bush, it went after the NAACP, Greenpeace and even a liberal church

While few are defending the Internal Revenue Service for targeting some 300 conservative groups, there are two critical pieces of context missing from the conventional wisdom on the "scandal." First, at least from what we know so far, the groups were not targeted in a political vendetta — but rather were executing a makeshift enforcement test (an ugly one, mind you) for IRS employees tasked with separating political groups not allowed to claim tax-exempt status, from bona fide social welfare organizations. Employees are given almost zero official guidance on how to do that, so they went after Tea Party groups because those seemed like they might be political. Keep in mind, the commissioner of the IRS at the time was a Bush appointee.

The second is that while this is the first time this kind of thing has become a national scandal, it's not the first time such activity has occurred.

"I wish there was more GOP interest when I raised the same issue during the Bush administration, where they audited a progressive church in my district in what look liked a very selective way," California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said on MSNBC Monday. "I found only one Republican, [North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones], that would join me in calling for an investigation during the Bush administration. I'm glad now that the GOP has found interest in this issue and it ought to be a bipartisan concern."

The well-known church, All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena, became a bit of a cause célèbre on the left after the IRS threatened to revoke the church's tax-exempt status over an anti-Iraq War sermon the Sunday before the 2004 election. "Jesus [would say], 'Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine,'" rector George Regas said from the dais.

The church, which said progressive activism was in its "DNA," hired a powerful Washington lawyer and enlisted the help of Schiff, who met with the commissioner of the IRS twice and called for a Government Accountability Office investigation, saying the IRS audit violated the First Amendment and was unduly targeting a political opponent of the Bush administration. "My client is very concerned that the close coordination undertaken by the IRS allowed partisan political concerns to direct the course of the All Saints examination," church attorney Marcus Owens, who is widely considered one of the country's leading experts on this area of the law, said at the time. In 2007, the IRS closed the case, decreeing that the church violated rules preventing political intervention, but it did not revoke its nonprofit status.

And while All Saints came under the gun, conservative churches across the country were helping to mobilize voters for Bush with little oversight. In 2006, citing the precedent of All Saints, "a group of religious leaders accused the Internal Revenue Service yesterday of playing politics by ignoring its complaint that two large churches in Ohio are engaging in what it says are political activities, in violation of the tax code," the New York Times reported at the time. The churches essentially campaigned for a Republican gubernatorial candidate, they alleged, and even flew him on one of their planes.

Meanwhile, Citizens for Ethics in Washington filed two ethics complaints against a church in Minnesota. "You know we can't publicly endorse as a church and would not for any candidate, but I can tell you personally that I'm going to vote for Michele Bachmann," pastor Mac Hammond of the Living Word Christian Center in Minnesota said in 2006 before welcoming her to the church. The IRS opened an audit into the church, but it went nowhere after the church appealed the audit on a technicality.

And it wasn't just churches. In 2004, the IRS went after the NAACP, auditing the nation's oldest civil rights group after its chairman criticized President Bush for being the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to address the organization. "They are saying if you criticize the president we are going to take your tax exemption away from you," then-chairman Julian Bond said. "It's pretty obvious that the complainant was someone who doesn't believe George Bush should be criticized, and it's obvious of their response that the IRS believes this, too."

In a letter to the IRS, Democratic Reps. Charles Rangel, Pete Stark and John Conyers wrote: "It is obvious that the timing of this IRS examination is nothing more than an effort to intimidate the members of the NAACP, and the communities the organization represents, in their get-out-the-vote effort nationwide."

Then, in 2006, the Wall Street Journal broke the story of a how a little-known pressure group called Public Interest Watch — which received 97 percent of its funds from Exxon Mobile one year — managed to get the IRS to open an investigation into Greenpeace. Greenpeace had labeled Exxon Mobil the "No. 1 climate criminal." The IRS acknowledged its audit was initiated by Public Interest Watch and threatened to revoke Greenpeace's tax-exempt status, but closed the investigation three months later.

As the Journal reporter, Steve Stecklow, later said in an interview, "This comes against a backdrop where a number of conservative groups have been attacking nonprofits and NGOs over their tax-exempt status. There have been hearings on Capitol Hill. There have been a number of conservative groups in Washington who have been quite critical."

Indeed, the year before that, the Senate held a hearing on nonprofits' political activity. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, the then-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the IRS needed better enforcement, but also "legislative changes" to better define the lines between politics and social welfare, since they had not been updated in "a generation." Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the IRS has defined 501(c)4′s sufficiently to this day, leaving the door open for IRS auditors to make up their own, discriminatory rules.

Those cases mostly involved 501(c)3 organizations, which live in a different section of the tax code for real charities like hospitals and schools. The rules are much stronger and better developed for (c)3′s, in part because they've been around longer. But with "social welfare" (c)4 groups, the kind of political activity we saw in 2010 and 2012 is so unprecedented that you get cases like Emerge America, a progressive nonprofit that trains Democratic female candidates for public office. The group has chapters across the country, but in 2011, chapters in Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada were denied 501(c)4 tax-exempt status. Leaders called the situation "bizarre" because in the five years Nevada had waited for approval, the Kentucky chapter was approved, only for the other three to be denied.

A former IRS official told the New York Times that probably meant the applications were sent to different offices, which use slightly different standards. Different offices within the same organization that are supposed to impose the exact same rules in a consistent manner have such uneven conceptions of where to draw the line at a political group, that they can approve one organization and then deny its twin in a different state.

All of these stories suggest that while concern with the IRS posture toward conservative groups now may be merited, to fully understand the situation requires a bit of context and history.

Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald. More Alex Seitz-Wald.

Proves my point about who does the loudest screeching.

[Gaspar]

It turns out that the same organized strategy employed in softening the Benghazi story was also used to hide the IRS probe to burry it until after the election.
Now, we just need to identify the architect, and most fingers are pointing in the same direction.  This has gone beyond unethical political favoritism into the realm of conspiratorial electioneering.  I am happy that both the conservative and the liberal media is viewing this with disgust now.

As to the examples from the Salon article above, those were individual cases, both related to the targeting of an individual organization for activities related to reported violations.  Very different than what J. Russell George, the Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration admitted to today in testimony, that there was indeed a "Target List" composed of groups that identified themselves as conservative, or in support of the constitution, Tea Party, or the goal of making the United States a better place.  These groups were not simply threatened with revocation or rejection, they and their members were audited and investigated, in some cases by multiple government agencies including the FBI, EPA, and IRS.  When it was found that they were in compliance their applications were systematically put in limbo. That represents a coordinated effort beyond anything the IRS alone could accomplish.

As Charlie Rangle said today "this is not Democrat or Republican, it relates to the integrity of the government and we are on the same side in as far as determining how this happened."

At the least, some one(s) are going to jail for this.  

[heironymouspasparagus]

Under George W. Bush, it went after the NAACP, Greenpeace and even a liberal church

While few are defending the Internal Revenue Service for targeting some 300 conservative groups

Well, everyone knows it had to be that way...it is a back and forth that is endemic to the environment in DC.

The Benghazi BS is the same kind of thing....while horrendous and worthy of action that would make heads roll - figuratively and literally - it is a whole bunch of RWRE carp about something that is vastly less significant than what happened under their regime.


Now, the AP document seizure - I haven't heard more than a few sound bites on that, but those bites make it seem very bad to me.  And since my natural inclination is at least mildly anti-government, this is the one that counts most as far as I am concerned....at least until I get more info about it.

[Conan71]

Was anyone else aware that IRS agents are eligible for bonuses?  The really big bonuses must be approved by the President.  I'm curious what yard stick was used to gauge Sarah Hall Ingram's performance to be awarded such high bonuses while heading the tax exempt division.

Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS executive in charge of the tax exempt division in 2010 when it began targeting conservative Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel groups for harassment, got more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012.

More recently, Ingram was promoted to serve as director of the tax agency's Obamacare program office, a position that put her in charge of the vast expansion of the IRS' regulatory power and staffing in connection with federal health care, ABC reported earlier today.

Ingram received a $7,000 bonus in 2009, according to data obtained by The Washington Examiner from the IRS, then a $34,440 bonus in 2010, $35,400 in 2011 and $26,550 last year, for a total of $103,390. Her annual salary went from $172,500 to $177,000 during the same period.

Sign Up for the Watchdog newsletter!
The 2010, 2011 and 2012 bonuses were awarded during the period when IRS harassment of the conservative groups was most intense. The newspaper obtained the data via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., described the Ingram awards as "stunning, just stunning."

Bonuses as large as those awarded to Ingram typically require presidential approval, according to federal personnel regulations.

High-ranking career federal civil servants like Ingram are eligible for recognition through citations known as Distinguished and Merit Service awards that can carry with them cash bonuses of anywhere from five to 35 percent of their base salary.

The largest of such awards, however, require presidential approval, according to the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the federal civil service workforce.

"If the recommended award is over $25,000, the Director of OPM reviews the nomination and forwards his/her recommendation to the President for approval," according to the OPM guidance.

A key point on OPM's "checklist" for federal bosses considering an employee for such a bonus is making sure that "the proposed award recipient has not been involved in any action or activity that could cause the President embarrassment ..."

Ingram has some history as a government lawyer receiving controversial bonuses. According to The Washington Post, she received a $47,900 bonus for distinguished service in 2004 from President George W. Bush.

Earlier Thursday, The Washington Examiner reported that the IRS paid out more than $92 million in bonuses during the four-year period of Ingram's awards to her and nearly 17,000 other agency employees. Those bonuses averaged more than $5,500 per employee.

Go here for a spreadsheet of the salary and bonus data for IRS employees getting bonuses between 2009 and 2012.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/irs-tax-exemptionobamacare-exec-got-100390-in-bonuses/article/2529899

[patric]

Now, the AP document seizure - I haven't heard more than a few sound bites on that, but those bites make it seem very bad to me.  And since my natural inclination is at least mildly anti-government, this is the one that counts most as far as I am concerned....at least until I get more info about it.

Perhaps because the deliberate undermining of a free press strikes more at the core of our liberty than whether or not a bunch of lobbyists get tax-exempt status.

You can believe in the Tea Party conspiracy theory, or you can believe that over-zealous bureaucrats took it upon themselves to scrutinize a large number of applicants who wanted to hide campaign contributions by posing as social welfare groups.

Look who got caught, and squealed the loudest.

[Gaspar]

Was anyone else aware that IRS agents are eligible for bonuses?  The really big bonuses must be approved by the President.  I'm curious what yard stick was used to gauge Sarah Hall Ingram's performance to be awarded such high bonuses while heading the tax exempt division.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/irs-tax-exemptionobamacare-exec-got-100390-in-bonuses/article/2529899

Odd that that would happen at a time when the administration was actively campaigning against such things as outrageous corporate bonuses, with many on the left pushing the idea of a "pay tzar" to limit executive compensation.  My mind is a bit fuzzy, but I seem to recall the President calling big executive bonuses "shameful". . .of course he probably only said that a hundred times or less.

Bonuses like that are typically a reward for a "job well done."  She obviously deserved it.

[Gaspar]

Perhaps because the deliberate undermining of a free press strikes more at the core of our liberty than whether or not a bunch of lobbyists get tax-exempt status.

I would have to agree with that, but you have to follow the sent to find the cheese. 

I think the AP Wiretap scandal may be the thread that unravels the other two.

Can't think of another reason that the White House would want to target reporters unless they were desperate to root out whistleblowers from within their own ranks before it was too late.

[Conan71]

a large number of applicants who wanted to hide campaign contributions by posing as social welfare groups.

You mean like moveon.org?

http://www.moveon.org/about.html

Or Center for American Progress, America Coming Together, Democracy Alliance, and a multitude of of other vehicles for wealthy liberals to launder their political contributions...

[Gaspar]

Uh oh.  The Treasury Department's Inspector General just testified that Obama admin officials knew of the IRS targeting before the election.   http://www.businessinsider.com/irs-scandal-obama-conservatives-tea-party-inspector-general-2013-5

That is exactly opposite of what Jay Carney, and the president said.

Someone's telling a stinker.

[patric]

You mean like moveon.org?
Or Center for American Progress, America Coming Together, Democracy Alliance, and a multitude of of other vehicles for wealthy liberals to launder their political contributions...

Their numbers could be staggering, spanning all political parties.
The bottom line is that you shouldn't have exempt status if you are actively political,
and for a while it seemed more and more were just using it to hide money.

[Ed W]

This pretty much sums up this round of faux outrage:

[Conan71]

Democrats were so concerned about "voter suppression" via voter ID programs or is it only a concern when they fear the voice of their voters may be suppressed?.

Where's the concern about an attempt to mute conservative voices by inhibiting vehicles to carry those voices during campaign seasons?

There's no faux outrage here.  Every single American should be concerned that the IRS can selectively target groups or people simply because either there's a systemic bias (which it's appearing this ran much further than two rogue agents in Ohio) or the actions of individuals within the department could carry out actions based on political bias or an outright personal vendetta on their neighbor.  The IRS is the most powerful bureaucracy in the United States.  Abuses within that agency need to be taken serious.

[patric]

Every single American should be concerned that the IRS can selectively target groups or people simply because either there's a systemic bias (which it's appearing this ran much further than two rogue agents in Ohio) or the actions of individuals within the department could carry out actions based on political bias or an outright personal vendetta on their neighbor.  The IRS is the most powerful bureaucracy in the United States.  Abuses within that agency need to be taken serious.

You are exactly right. 
That's why its so childish for the GOP to want to stand out as the sole victim.

This should be a non-partisan cause.