We want to know that the IRS is doing their job, for sure, and if people are gaming the system, they need to be all over that. No one is saying otherwise, I don't think.

But the lost emails smacks of a cover-up. The truth needs to come out. Motives need to be understood. Why is that such a difficult concept? Why would anyone equivocate on that?

I would have thought that a simple explanation along the lines of " On the face of it, It seemed like to was a widely organized scheme to avoid taxes illegally . We targeted them because it was appropriate to target them. And we targeted so many becasue there were so many."

Ray Jay wrote:Ricky:

I would have thought that a simple explanation along the lines of " On the face of it, It seemed like to was a widely organized scheme to avoid taxes illegally . We targeted them because it was appropriate to target them. And we targeted so many becasue there were so many."

That certainly sounds better than "we are life long Democrats and we wanted to do everything in our power to hurt conservatives in the upcoming election, especially after the President said we should" Perhaps e-mails will surface and we will find out which story is the true one..

rickyp wrote:geo

We want to know that the IRS is doing their job, for sure, and if people are gaming the system, they need to be all over that. No one is saying otherwise, I don't think.

And yet, there is absolutely no discussion about the tax avoidance schemes. What reporting has there been done on how valid the targeting was? That is, how much of the targeting turned out to be completely appropriate.
Where there's smoke there's fire ...

Two months later, the IRS initiated the first round of questions for True the Vote. Catherine painstakingly answered them, knowing that nonprofit status would help with the organization’s credibility, donors, and grant applications. In October, the IRS requested additional information. And whenever Catherine followed up with IRS agents about the status of True the Vote’s application, “there was always a delay that our application was going to be up next, and it was just around the corner,” she says,

As this was occurring, the FBI continued to phone King Street Patriots. In May 2011, agents phoned wondering “how they were doing.” The FBI made further inquiries in June, November, and December asking whether there was anything to report.

The situation escalated in 2012. That February, True the Vote received a third request for information from the IRS, which also sent its first questionnaire to King Street Patriots. Catherine says the IRS had “hundreds of questions — hundreds and hundreds of questions.” The IRS requested every Facebook post and Tweet she had ever written. She received questions about her family, whether she’d ever run for political office, and which organizations she had spoken to.

“It’s no great secret that the IRS is considered to be one of the more serious [federal agencies],” Catherine says. “When you get a call from the IRS, you don’t take it lightly. So when you’re asked questions that seem to imply a sense of disapproval, it has a very chilling effect.”

On the same day they received the questions from the IRS, Catherine says, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) launched an unscheduled audit of their machine shop, forcing the Engelbrechts to drop everything planned for that day. Though the Engelbrechts have a Class 7 license, which allows them to make component parts for guns, they do not manufacture firearms. Catherine said that while the ATF had a right to conduct the audit, “it was odd that they did it completely unannounced, and they took five, six hours. . . . It was so extensive. It just felt kind of weird.”

That was in February. In July, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration paid a visit to Engelbrecht Manufacturing while Bryan, Catherine, and their children were out of town. The OSHA inspector talked with the managerial staff and employees, inspecting the premises minutely. But Bryan says the agent found only “little Mickey Mouse stuff, like, ‘You have safety glasses on, but not the right kind; the forklift has a seatbelt, but not the right kind.’” Yet Catherine and Bryan said the OSHA inspector complimented them on their tightly run shop and said she didn’t know why she had been sent to examine it.

Not long after, the tab arrived. OSHA was imposing $25,000 in fines on Engelbrecht Manufacturing. They eventually worked it down to $17,500, and Bryan says they may have tried to contest the fines to drive them even lower, but “we didn’t want to make any more waves, because we don’t know [how much further] OSHA could reach.”

“Bottom line is, it hurt,” he says. Fifteen thousand dollars is “not an insignificant amount to this company. It might be to other companies, but we’re still considered small, and it came at a time when business was slow, so instead of giving an employee a raise or potentially hiring another employee, I’m writing a check to our government.”

A few months later, True the Vote became the subject of congressional scrutiny. In September, Senator Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) wrote to Thomas Perez, then the assistant attorney general of the civil rights division at the Department of Justice (who has now been nominated for labor secretary). “As you know, an organization called ‘True the Vote,’ which is an offshoot of the Tea Party, is leading a voter suppression campaign in many states,” Boxer wrote, adding that “this type of intimidation must stop. I don’t believe this is ‘True the Vote.’ I believe it’s ‘Stop the Vote.’”

And in October, Representative Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, attacked True the Vote in a letter. He wrote that “some have suggested that your true goal is not voter integrity, but voter suppression against thousands of legitimate voters who traditionally vote for Democratic candidates.” He added that: “If these efforts are intentional, politically motivated, and widespread across multiple states, they could amount to a criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights.” He also decried True the Vote on MSNBC and CNN.

Catherine now says that she “absolutely” thinks that because she worked against voter fraud, the Left was irked and decided to target her.

The next month, in November 2012, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state’s environmental agency, showed up for an unscheduled audit at Engelbrecht Manufacturing. Catherine says the inspector told her the agency had received a complaint but couldn’t provide any more details. After the inspection, the agency notified the Engelbrechts that they needed to pay for an additional mechanical permit, which cost about $2,000 per year.

Since then, the IRS has sent two further rounds of questions to Catherine for her organizations. And last month, the ATF conducted a second unscheduled audit at Engelbrecht Manufacturing.

Catherine says she still hasn’t received IRS approval for her nonprofits, though she filed nearly three years ago. And “the way all of these personal instances interweave with what was going on on the nonprofit side . . . it amounts to something. You can’t help but think that statistically, this has to be coordinated on some level.”

Ray Jay wrote:Ricky:

I would have thought that a simple explanation along the lines of " On the face of it, It seemed like to was a widely organized scheme to avoid taxes illegally . We targeted them because it was appropriate to target them. And we targeted so many because there were so many."

That certainly sounds better than "we are life long Democrats and we wanted to do everything in our power to hurt conservatives in the upcoming election, especially after the President said we should" Perhaps e-mails will surface and we will find out which story is the true one.

The IRS gave extra scrutiny to 298 groups applying for tax-exempt status, the Washington Post reported. Seventy-two of those groups had "tea party" in their title, 13 had "patriots," and 11 had "9/12," shorthand for the 9/12 movement started by conservative TV host Glenn Beck.
But IRS officials not only singled out tea party and liberty groups. They also looked for "political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement," according to the leaked timeline. This included groups that planned to focus on government debt and spending, taxes, or those trying to "make America a better place to live." In June 2011, Lerner reportedly became aware of what was going on and directed staffers to change to how they vetted nonprofit applications

Does this mess have any connection to all that "dark money" you guys write about? Yes. Before this scandal broke, 501(c)(4) nonprofit groups were already making headlines for their political spending. Secretive nonprofits like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, and the American Action Network spent huge sums of money to influence the 2012 elections. Campaign watchdogs say those groups have flouted the law, which says 501(c)(4) groups can't make politics their "primary purpose." Watchdogs have demanded that the IRS and the Federal Election Commission crack down on these nonprofits for spending too much time and money on politics.
The IRS's tea party scandal, however, could hinder the agency's willingness to ensure politically active nonprofits obey the law. The IRS will likely operate on this front with even more caution, taking pains not to appear biased or too aggressive. That in turn could cause the agency to shy away from uncovering 501(c)(4) organizations that do in fact abuse their tax-exempt status by focusing primarily on politics.
On the day Lerner offered her apology, Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California­-Irvine, asked: "How will this affect legitimate efforts to get IRS deny c4 status to secret election groups?" Marc Elias, a respected election lawyer who represents Democrats, replied: "Not much of a question—it will hurt it, a lot."

One group,

rickyp wrote:Should the IRS not be able to enforce the law?

straw man
noun
noun: straw man; plural noun: straw men; noun: strawman; plural noun: strawmen

a person compared to a straw image; a sham.
a sham argument set up to be defeated.

The IRS gave extra scrutiny to 298 groups applying for tax-exempt status, the Washington Post reported. Seventy-two of those groups had "tea party" in their title, 13 had "patriots," and 11 had "9/12," shorthand for the 9/12 movement started by conservative TV host Glenn Beck.
But IRS officials not only singled out tea party and liberty groups. They also looked for "political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement," according to the leaked timeline. This included groups that planned to focus on government debt and spending, taxes, or those trying to "make America a better place to live." In June 2011, Lerner reportedly became aware of what was going on and directed staffers to change to how they vetted nonprofit applications

How has the IRS responded? Lerner, in her public apology, said political bias was not the reason the IRS singled out conservative groups. Instead, she explained, staffers in the agency's Cincinnati office were trying to manage the deluge of applications for tax-exempt status under the 501(c)(4) section of the tax law.

Eventually, IRS employees in at least Cincinnati, Ohio; El Monte, California; Laguna Niguel, California; and Washington, D.C.[48] applied closer scrutiny to applications from organizations that:[49][50][51]

referenced words such as "Tea Party", "Patriots", or "9/12 Project", "progressive," "occupy," "Israel," "open source software," "medical marijuana" and "occupied territory advocacy" in the case file;[46][47]
outlined issues in the application that included government spending, government debt, or taxes;
involved advocating or lobbying to "make America a better place to live";
had statements in the case file that criticized how the country is being run;
advocated education about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights;
were focused on challenging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — known by many as Obamacare;
questioned the integrity of federal elections.

Over the two years between April 2010 and April 2012, the IRS essentially placed on hold the processing of applications for 501(c)(4) tax-exemption status received from organizations with "Tea Party", "patriots", or "9/12" in their names. While apparently none of these organizations' applications were denied during this period,[Note 2] only 4 were approved.[53] During the same general period, the agency approved applications from several dozen presumably liberal-leaning organizations whose names included terms such as "progressive", "progress", "liberal", or "equality".[53][54] However, the IRS also selected several progressive- or Democratic-leaning organizations for increased scrutiny. An affiliate of the liberal group Emerge America had its request for tax-exempt status denied, leading to a review (and the eventual revocation) of the larger Emerge America organization's tax-exempt status.[52] Nevertheless, the conservative National Review claims that a November 2010 version of the IRS's BOLO list indicates that liberal and conservative groups were in fact treated differently because liberal groups could be approved for tax-exempt status by line agents, while tea party groups could not.[6]

The question that seems to be missed, is whether or not there was indeed a fairly organized effort to avoid taxation. And the law is quite clear.
If it was mostly a theme or method used by Tea Party groups, or groups that provided evidence of their intent in their name or web site .... then the targeting was legitimate.
And the mistake is apologizing for targeting people who had every intention of or when in the midst of tax avoidance.

An analogy. You can screen people going to an airport by looking for people whi fall into a category that most terrorists fall into... or you can screen a cerrtain (sic) number of people on a random scale to be fair. I'll go with the first scenario in hopes of actually catching the law breakers...

Fate

One group,

Of 298?
From what I've read, the average citizen or company can go through hell at the IRS. That one of these groups had a hard time, and may have been legitimate, isn't extraordinary.

Strikes me that this is a tax evasion scheme on a large scale, that is now g=being (sic) protected by politcal (sic) outrage because the IRS management is less than competent in defending their actions. And because a legitimate course of investigation may be tainted because ot (sic) was "politically correct". Its like getting upset by investigations of the Mafia because somehwere (sic) their membership is described by the investigators as "Italians".

You may not know this, but most Americans don't like the IRS.

But the main reason why Americans dislike dealing with the IRS is not, however, the bureaucrats’ fault. Congress keeps making the tax code more complex. It is now 4m words long, and has been changed over 4,000 times since 2001. Americans spend 6.1 billion hours a year complying with it—enough work to keep over 3m people employed full-time without producing anything. Nearly 90% of filers pay for help with their returns. The cost of all this is equivalent to 15% of the tax raised says the Taxpayer Advocate, an ombudsman. Yet change may be a long time coming. Politicians usually balk at taking on the myriad vested interests which all ferociously defend their favourite tax breaks, says Bill Gale of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. For that reason, he argues, “tax reform is always the bridesmaid and never the bride”

What we like even less is the idea that the IRS might be playing favorites.

It's not been proven yet, but there are many reasons to be suspicious

rickyp wrote:

What we like even less is the idea that the IRS might be playing favorites.

I think most people are pretty sure millionares, and corporations are able to use the incredibly complex tax code to their advantage and avoid paying taxes.
If Tea Party groups were doing exactly that, using the complex tax code to avoid paying taxes, they should be prosecuted.

The notion that there is a more fair way to identify likely tax miscreants is really kind of silly.
If the beareaucrats (sic) perceived, with ample evidence, that there was an organized attempt to avoid paying tazxes (sic) by Tea Party groups they had every right to specifically single them out for special attention.
You fish where the fish are.
To do otherwise would be inefficient.

The mistake is covering up the strategy, and apologizing for it... Whoever was responsible should have owned it and explained why it was justifiable. Period.
If Darryl Issa had a problem with rooting out tax cheats because they were politically aligned with him, he should stand up and say why the IRS should avoid going after them even when they have enough evidence to justify heightened scrutiny. It isn't discrimination if they are guilty.

It's not been proven yet, but there are many reasons to be suspicious

.
There were more reasons to be suspicius that the TP groups were trying to illegally avoid taxes.

You want the government to discriminate on the basis of no wrongdoing, but on political philosophy.

Make allegations of tax evasion and adduce no evidence for them.

New Records: IRS Targeted Progressive Groups More Extensively Than Tea Party

Just because the name is "Taxed Enough Already" doesn't make them tax scofflaws.

rickyp wrote:fate

You want the government to discriminate on the basis of no wrongdoing, but on political philosophy.

I would want government agencies charged with upholding the law to spend their resources and times best. If there is a trend that some organizations are attempting to use tax law illegally I'd want them to be held to special scrutiny.

In the same way that i don't disapprove of profiling when searching travellers. The Arab looking guy does deserve a little more scrutiny than the 90 year old Japanese lady.

Fate

Make allegations of tax evasion and adduce no evidence for them.

Whenever a group applies for special tax status, they need to qualify. Issa and others seem to contend that the groups should simply be given a pass. And the fact is, that

New Records: IRS Targeted Progressive Groups More Extensively Than Tea Party

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/ ... um=twitter

Apologizing for vigilance in doing their jobs is something Lerner should never have done.

A competent IRS management would have taken the problem head on and asked if they should be passing this sudden onrush of requests without due scrutiny?

fate

Just because the name is "Taxed Enough Already" doesn't make them tax scofflaws.

If it isn't a clear indication that they might be seeking to avoid taxes by illegally claiming 501(C) status I don't know what would.

In the same way that I would scrutinize someone with a Hells Angels jacket on more closely around an area where there was heavy drug use, these colors also call for closer attention around the areas where tax avoidance is the issue.

Doctor Fate wrote:No cover-up? Read this, especially Lerner's message.

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/07/09/l ... st-emails/