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IRS targeting conservative groups

carbinemike

carbinemike

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A lot of the things in politics can sound like far out conspiracy theories. Some probably are. This one is true. It shows how the government can and will work to harass and targets opponents. The IRS has admitted and apologized for targeting conservative groups leading up to the last election.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Organizations were singled out because they included the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

"That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That's not how we go about selecting cases for further review," Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/irs-apologizes-targeting-conservative-groups
 
And what is being done about it?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess: Nothing.
 
The machine doesn't punish it's own. If anything they may be scolded and maybe a low level peon could be demoted. It won't be for illegally targeting certain groups but for being dumb enough to get caught.
 
John A. said:
And what is being done about it?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess: Nothing.
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Yup. No one cared about Benghazi where people died, I doubt this will go anywhere. Pretty sad, if this had happened under Bush.....

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John A. said:
And what is being done about it?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess: Nothing.
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You know I'll step a little further out on that limb and say that Lerner got done with that interview, walked behind closed doors and gave the thumbs up to continue doing it!
 
The White House Press clown, Carney, was asked about this illegal harassment. He responded as a true Obama lackey...it's Bush's fault. The guy running the IRS was appointed by Bush.

"I.R.S. is an independent enforcement agency," said Carney. "The -- which I believe, as I understand it, contains only two political appointees within it. The individual who is running the I.R.S. at the time was actually an appointee from the previous administration."
 
I also read that the upper level of the IRS denies any knowledge and that it is the doing of low-level employees on their own...So the IRS doesn't monitor it's employees?
 
The House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight has thrown down an investigative gauntlet to the Internal Revenue Service, demanding that the agency hand over by next Wednesday every communication in its records that includes the words “tea party,” “patriot” or “conservative.”

The committee is also demanding of the IRS that by next Wednesday it provide the committee with the names and titles of all individuals who were involved in targeting conservative non-profit groups for more intensive review of their applications for non-profit status.

I still don't expect to see anything in the way of people being held accountable come out of this. They have already made statements that it was all low level employees that did this on their own. It has also come out that the IRS targeted Jewish groups. The media will ignore that. Now if it had been Islamic groups targeted...
 
I hope they do something about it.

I'm starting to hold my breath in

3...2...1..holding.
 
Chilling. What the hell happened to my country?

At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials targeted nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general.

The Internal Revenue Service's scrutiny of conservative groups went beyond those that had "tea party" or "patriot" in their names—as the agency admitted Friday—to also include ones that raised concerns over government spending, debt or taxes, and even ones that lobbied to "make America a better place to live," according to new details of a government probe.

The groups targeted by the IRS also seem to support the same ideals as those that were labeled as potential terrorists last year.
 
So now it appears (OMG) that the upper level knew what the lower level was doing as early as last year...ya think? So the pres says heads must roll and there must be full accountability? Really, Barry? This is your administration and you have absolutely no idea what your folks are doing? It is time to give up the charade...there was a high level economist (whatever the hell that is) that said Barry won't make it to the end of his second term. Caught that in passing last week. They showed a picture of Greenspan but I'm not sure that it was him saying it. Not sure what that would do to the country right now.
 
This morning from the Washington Post:

At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials targeted nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general.

The documents, obtained by The Washington Post from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that on June 29, 2011, IRS staffers held a briefing with senior agency official Lois G. Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where “statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run.” Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the agency, raised objections and the agency revised its criteria a week later.

But six months later, the IRS applied a new political test to groups that applied for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” groups, the document says. On Jan. 15, 2012 the agency decided to target “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement.,” according to the appendix in the IG report, which was requested by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and has yet to be released.

The new revelations are likely to intensify criticism of the IRS, which has been under fire since agency officials acknowledged they had deliberately targeted groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their name for heightened scrutiny.

More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/pos ... port-says/
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It sounds like this will get uglier and uglier. Surprise, surprise, the White House is denying knowledge.

We are kidding ourselves if we think we are free with this kind of crap going on. Last week it came out that they record every cell phone call. Scares the crap out of me wondering what they're doing that we don't know about.

The Internal Revenue Service wrote to the Richmond Tea Party last year demanding to know the names of all its financial donors and volunteers, as part of a 55-question inquisition into its application for tax-exempt status, MailOnline has learned.
The agency wanted to know 'the names of the donors, contributors, and grantors' for every year 'from inception to the present.'
It also demanded 'the amounts of each of the donations, contributions, and grants and the dates you received them.'
'How did you use these donations, contributions, and grants?' the IRS asked. 'Provide the details.'
The Richmond Tea Party received a lengthy list of questions from the IRS, including demands for lists of its donors and volunteers
And in addition to the names of board members, officers and employees, the nation's taxing authorities insisted on knowing the names of everyone who helped the Richmond Tea Party without compensation.
'Please identify your volunteers,' the January 9, 2012 letter from the IRS read.
The agency also required the Virginia conservative group to provide copies of sections of its website that only its members can access.
The IRS came under fire on Friday when its Office of Inspector General released a draft of an investigative timeline showing that the agency had played political favorites with nonprofit groups seeking tax-exempt status.
In 2010, according to that investigation, the Cincinnati-based IRS office responsible for vetting tax-exempt applications began targeting groups with 'Tea Party or similar' words in their names – including words like 'patriots' and '9/12' – for tighter scrutiny.

The Richmond Tea Party received this demand along with dozens of others from the IRS, asking for a list of its donors and the amounts they had contributed. The group refused, citing their donors' right to privacy
The IRS ultimately identified approximately 300 such organizations, many of which were independently organized in 2009 and 2010 under the larger 'tea party' banner. Those groups had a decisive impact in the 2010 midterm congressional elections, and became a thorn in the side of the Democratic party, costing it race after race, especially in the House of Representatives, which shifted to Republican control.
In the nearly three years since the IRS began looking more closely at conservative nonprofit groups than others, 125 of the 300 target organizations have been approved for tax-exempt status. Another 25 withdrew their applications. The remainder are still waiting.
The Office of Inspector General's timeline shows that in Washington, senior officials with the IRS were made aware of the practice by at least August 4, 2011. On that date, the chief counsel of the IRS met with the agency's Rulings and Agreements unit 'so that everyone would have the latest information on the issue.'
But during a press gaggle about Air Force One on Monday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney insisted the White House was unaware of the investigation or its political implications until last month.
 
Some of the information they were requesting had nothing to do with taxes.

Who are your volunteers????? C'mon.

volunteer = none of your business.
 
Todays IRS news. A liberal leaning group came forward to say that the IRS was feeding them applications for tax exempt status of conservative groups prior to the 2012 election. How low will it go? It also came out today that the EPA was also heavily favoring liberal groups over conservative ones. On and on and on.

The progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office that targeted and harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave the progressive group nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was pending.

The commendable admission lends further evidence to the lengths the IRS went during an election cycle to silence tea party and limited government voices.

ProPublica says the documents the IRS gave them were “not supposed to be made public”:

The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year... In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)

The group says that "no unapproved applications from liberal groups were sent to ProPublica.”
 
And this is the bunch that is going to enforce Obamacare! :shock: :shock: :x

The Internal Revenue Service asked tea party groups to see donor rolls.

It asked for printouts of Facebook posts.
And it asked what books people were reading.

A POLITICO review of documents from 11 tea party and conservative groups that the IRS scrutinized in 2012 shows the agency wanted to know everything — in some cases, it even seemed curious what members were thinking. The review included interviews with groups or their representatives from Hawaii, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere.

The long-awaited Treasury Department inspector general report released Tuesday says the agency itself decided some of its questions to conservative groups were way over the line — especially the one about donors.

The report shows that top IRS officials put a stop to some of the questions in early 2012, including the ones that asked tea party groups who their donors were, what issues were important to them and whether their top officers ever planned to run for office. And they told the investigators they planned to destroy the donor lists that had already been sent in.

But interviews with members of the groups paint a more dramatic picture than the bland language of the report, which just says the IRS “requested irrelevant (unnecessary) information because of a lack of managerial review, at all levels, of questions before they were sent to organizations seeking tax-exempt status.”

“They were asking for a U-Haul truck’s worth of information,” said Toby Marie Walker, the president of the Waco Tea Party.

Some groups even gave up in the face of the IRS questions.

Several of the groups were asked for résumés of top officers and descriptions of interviews with the media. One group was asked to provide “minutes of all board meetings since your creation.”

Some of the letters asked for copies of the groups’ Web pages, blog posts and social media postings — making some tea party members worry they’d be punished for their tweets or Facebook comments by their followers.

And each letter had a stern warning about “penalties of perjury” — which became intimidating for groups that were being asked about future activities, like future donations or endorsements.

In one instance, the American Patriots Against Government Excess was asked to provide summaries or copies of all material passed out at meetings. The group had been reading “The 5000 Year Leap” by Cleon Skousen and the U.S. Constitution.

The group’s president, Marion Bower, sent a copy of both to the IRS. “I don’t have time to write a book report for them,” she said.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/t ... z2TMelGYyT
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I'm glad I am not the only person seeing the need for extensive reform in all area's of Government.

Long overdue. If it happens at all.

But I can gaurantee that it never will unless "We the people" start speaking up more loudly, and much more often and with enough stink and backbone to make it change. It won't do it itself.
 
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