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Relevance: 100% Posted on: June 4, 2013
Every day: more revelations, more questions. Was the IRS’s repressive targeting of Tea Party and similar groups seeking tax-exempt status “accidental”? Were only a few rogue or harried clerks responsible for the repressive targeting? Did anybody in the White House know about the repressive targeting as it happened? What does…
Relevance: 97% Posted on: July 22, 2013
The more we learn about the latest IRS scandal, the harder it is to evade what it is all about: the systematic thwarting— for years on end — of legitimate applications for tax-exempt status submitted by Tea Party and other conservative groups. It’s getting pretty thick and deep in the…
Relevance: 94% Posted on: November 13, 2014
We’re still unraveling the IRS’s prolific crimes. I mean, those pertaining to its ideological targeting of conservative applicants for non-profit status. I’m satisfied that the various individuals and organizations suing the IRS or publishing commentaries on this still-unfolding scandal (Day 552 now) will keep on keepin’ on. I’m a little…
Relevance: 88% Posted on: June 13, 2013
Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings says it’s time to stop investigating the latest IRS shenanigans. According to him, closed-door interviews with IRS staffers prove that no White House or other Washington officials were involved in targeting the applications for tax-exempt status of conservative groups for special obstructionist attention. Whew! Crisis over.…
Relevance: 87% Posted on: February 8, 2014
Over at Townhall this weekend, the subject is one we have tracked closely here at Common Sense. The IRS appears to have been captured by the Democratic Party, and now serves not the citizenry but that wing of government. Click on over, but come back here for source material. And…
Relevance: 82% Posted on: March 26, 2014
In the better-late-than-never department, the Internal Revenue Service has granted tax-exempt status to Friends of Abe. Variety magazine calls the group “Hollywood’s largest fellowship of conservative and right-of-center independents” in an industry known for tilting 320 degrees or so to the left. The status comes three years after the Friends…
Relevance: 81% Posted on: December 24, 2017
We have the names of the bureaucrats responsible. But the scandal? Don't call it that! (Says the insider press.) Click over to Townhall for the precise words to describe this sad recent history. If you return here you can read more on the subject: Washington Post: Fallout from allegations of…
Relevance: 79% Posted on: November 22, 2013
We’re past Day 195 of the IRS scandal. I mean the one about how IRS agents processing applications for tax-exempt status gave an especially hard time to Tea Party and similar groups, asking endless intrusive questions and delaying legitimate tax-exempt status for years or never granting it at all. The…
Relevance: 79% Posted on: May 28, 2014
It’s like jumping from ice floe to ice floe while being shot at. Great if you can reach the next slab of ice while the shooters pause to reload. But then what? Having been caught targeting right-leaning applicants for tax-exempt status, the IRS decided to clear up the “ambiguity” in…
Relevance: 77% Posted on: May 12, 2013
This weekend's Common Sense column over at Townhall.com is about those awful Nixonian reactionaries who use government to suppress opposition and help establish fascist right-wing government here in America. Oops. No, it isn't. It's about those awful Obamanian “progressives” using government to suppress opposition and help establish etc. etc. Click…
Relevance: 75% Posted on: April 21, 2014
Inadvertent? Un-partisan? No direction from above? Such were many of the early claims in response to the scandal over IRS’s targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. The characterization was not vindicated when Lois Lerner — who ran the agency’s division dealing with exempt organizations until…
Relevance: 74% Posted on: April 15, 2015
Is it time to spell out the IRS as the Internal Revenue Scandal? The IRS has so many scandals under its belt. But the biggest, from a broad, threat-to-the-republic point of view, surely remains the agency’s targeting of Tea Party and conservative organizations seeking 501c(3) and 501c(4) nonprofit status. Agents…
Relevance: 71% Posted on: May 14, 2013
We were initially told that the IRS had apologized to Tea Party and patriot groups for blocking them from non-profit tax status. But there has been no apology. Instead, last Friday, Lois Lerner, the head of the tax-exempt division of the Internal Revenue Service, confided to a group of tax…
Relevance: 70% Posted on: January 28, 2014
The Internal Revenue Service has proposed new regulations to restrict the eligibility of nonprofit organizations applying for tax-exempt status. Per the proposal, nonprofits tainted by certain kinds of political activity will be ineligible, since those kinds ipso facto don’t do anybody any good. Forget that “social welfare” and “political” issues…
Relevance: 69% Posted on: November 27, 2018
The old keywords were “Constitution,” “Patriot” and “Tea Party.” The new ones? “Marijuana,” “oxycodone,” and “legalization.” Paul Caron, the TaxProf blogger, calls attention to another IRS scandal — again about denying tax-exempt status to organizations because of their political views. He had barely finished blogging about the scandal that came…
Relevance: 67% Posted on: February 4, 2014
Should a spurious inalienable right to Employee Confidentiality protect IRS personnel from being held accountable when they commit crimes? In 2010, Christine O’Donnell, then running for U.S. Senate, had to fend off false accusations about tax liabilities on property she no longer owned — after her tax returns had been…
Relevance: 67% Posted on: December 26, 2017
“They’ve been burned. They’ve been hammered. They’ve been bludgeoned,” George Washington University law professor Miriam Galston explained to the Washington Post. “They’re trying to survive.” In this heartbreaking discussion at this special time of year, the “they” are the poor, long-suffering folks . . . at the Internal Revenue Service. According…
Relevance: 66% Posted on: June 19, 2014
It’s hard to keep track of things. It helps to make a list. I’m trying to follow all the IRS-scandal stonewalling, the latest example of which is how emails inculpating Lois Lerner and others have mysteriously disappeared; with, allegedly, no server backups (see my latest Townhall column, “The Dog Ate…
Relevance: 65% Posted on: July 7, 2015
Last week National Review reported that Republicans in the U.S. House have long been pondering impeachment of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen for stonewalling about whether Lois Lerner’s emails were lost and irretrievable. Lerner is the former IRS official who oversaw the obstructing of applications for non-profit status by right-leaning and…
Relevance: 65% Posted on: December 8, 2014
Sometimes those who wield power over us seem less than honest about whether they’re following their own professed rules, including rules mandated by law. The latest example comes to us courtesy of the watchdog group Cause of Action, which filed a Freedom of Information request for correspondence between the IRS…
Relevance: 63% Posted on: October 28, 2014
Outrageous. That’s the best word for the recent court decision letting the Internal Revenue Service off the hook for ideologically targeting organizations that apply for tax-exempt status. True the Vote, which combats voter fraud, sued the Internal Revenue Service because of the tax agency’s deliberate obstruction of applications from Tea…
Relevance: 62% Posted on: May 22, 2013
MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry says “no one was fundamentally harmed” by the IRS’s targeting of Obama-unapproved applicants for tax-exempt status. (Go to 4:00 of the video to skip the preceding lies.) Elsewhere, detestable Bill Maher inquires: “Is it unreasonable [for IRS] to target an anti-tax group?” Good lord. I’ve discussed the…
Relevance: 62% Posted on: April 3, 2014
I’m hesitating. But given the way many IRS honchos have too often behaved throughout the agency’s history, including today — yes, I’ll applaud Randolph Thrower for saying no to a President. Thrower died in March at the age of 100 as the “IRS Chief Who Resisted Nixon.” He had headed…
Relevance: 62% Posted on: August 28, 2014
I fib. We’re not really learning anything new about Lois Lerner’s modus operandi. It’s just the same old wiping of evidence — evidence that she and others at IRS knew was relevant to congressional inquiry into IRS misconduct. Lerner is the former IRS department head in charge of reviewing applications…
Relevance: 61% Posted on: June 25, 2013
Remember the IRS scandal? I mean the one about how the Internal Revenue Service has been monkey-wrenching the applications for tax-exempt status submitted by politically non-leftward organizations (Tax Prof Blog has the latest). But politically motivated clogging of an application process is just one way that the IRS abuses us.…
Relevance: 61% Posted on: April 10, 2015
As Tax Day approaches, you can bet the Internal Revenue Service has readied itself to help taxpayers file their returns. No? “It’s abysmal,” admits IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, discussing his agency’s help for Americans trying to decipher a byzantine, ever-changing tax code. It seems only four of ten citizens ever…
Relevance: 61% Posted on: August 8, 2013
The Federal Election Commission is now implicated in the Obama administration’s years-long hounding of groups ideologically hostile to it. Wall Street Journal Editorial Board member Kimberly Strassel details how, at the behest of a lawyer in the Obama administration, FEC staff “have been engaged in their own conservative targeting, with…
Relevance: 60% Posted on: August 19, 2013
While discussing the latest IRS scandal — the one about how the IRS has been (is still) stacking the deck against non-lefty nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status — the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto mentions another kind of deck-stacking: campaign financial regulation. Seems that Hillary Clinton, still running for president, is…
Relevance: 59% Posted on: August 6, 2001
Even the IRS can make mistakes. Just look at the historical record. Sometimes the IRS confiscates property they really should not have confiscated. Sometimes the IRS deprives people of constitutional rights they really should not have deprived people of. Sometimes the IRS intimidates and terrifies people they really should not…
Relevance: 59% Posted on: February 18, 2014
You can’t get much more explicit about the desire to wield power against political opponents solely because they’re political opponents than Senator Chuck Schumer’s recent public demand, reported in The Hill (“Vulnerable Dems want IRS to step up”): The Tea Party elites gained extraordinary influence by being able to funnel…
Relevance: 58% Posted on: June 9, 2023
The IRS wants to do your tax returns. Should we let it? On this question, the agency has stacked the deck in its favor by commissioning an “independent” review by a left-wing think tank, New America, already on record in support of giving IRS officials authority to do this. Basically,…
Relevance: 58% Posted on: June 25, 2014
The IRS has a “Love Story” relationship with citizens. Being the IRS means never having to say you’re sorry. Actually, in real life, as opposed to cinematic catch phrases, people who care about each other do often feel a need to genuinely apologize about actual wrongs. But the IRS doesn’t…
Relevance: 58% Posted on: March 24, 2010
On the one hand, we’ve got trillion-dollar federal deficits and no sign of any austerity measure on the congressional horizon. On the other hand, we’ve got dark-suited IRS agents bullying small businessmen for allegedly being four cents behind in taxes. The letter that the two IRS suits hand-delivered to the…
Relevance: 55% Posted on: January 1, 2014
A year after the IRS seized their bank account, Terry Dehko and his daughter have gotten their money back, thanks to a lawsuit they undertook with the help of the valiant Institute for Justice. The IRS had looked at how the Dehkoses deposited revenues from their Fraser, Michigan store and…
Relevance: 55% Posted on: January 24, 2018
Blogger Paul Caron, dean of Pepperdine Law School, still counts the days since we learned that the IRS was blocking applications for nonprofit status from right-leaning groups at the behest of former IRS honcho Lois Lerner. Now years later, the agency can still arbitrarily victimize any one of us. Nor…
Relevance: 54% Posted on: January 28, 2013
The aptly named decision Loving v. IRS—it’s so true, you know—provides a modest victory in the war of tax-takers versus everybody else. The ruling, brought to our attention by the Institute for Justice, a party to the lawsuit, concerns IRS regulation of tax preparers. The IRS wants to force non-attorney,…
Relevance: 51% Posted on: March 6, 2014
I like the Fifth Amendment. I took it myself in 2007 when Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson was witch-hunting with his grand jury. My attorney advised that I had more to fear from innocently misstating something and being vindictively charged with perjury than from the ridiculous indictments the AG would…
Relevance: 50% Posted on: March 22, 2012
The taxman puts his hands in our pockets. But it’s one thing to reach into our bank accounts and take our money, it is quite another when governments engage in different kind of overreach, where they go beyond the rule of law and just start pushing people around. Take the…
Relevance: 50% Posted on: June 15, 2014
It just so happens that the email you requested is no longer available. Bad hard drive. Oh, amend that. Two whole years of emails are missing. Sorry to inconvenience you. Check Townhall this weekend for more on the IRS's hyper-convenient email scandal. Then click back here for more reading. Wall…
Relevance: 49% Posted on: February 6, 2014
“I promise you that we hold everybody up and down the line accountable,” President Barack Obama told Bill O’Reilly of Fox News during last Sunday’s Super Bowl interview. When studies show one in 20 food stamp transactions to be fraudulent; when the GAO finds $120 million a year spent paying…
Relevance: 48% Posted on: February 12, 2014
“I promise you that we hold everybody up and down the line accountable,” President Barack Obama told Bill O’Reilly of Fox News during last Sunday’s Super Bowl interview . . . and with a straight face. When studies show one in 20 food stamp transactions to be fraudulent; when the…
Relevance: 48% Posted on: July 26, 2023
The Internal Revenue Service says it will end “most” surprise visits to homes, like the one an agent made to the home of journalist Matt Taibbi the day he was telling Congress about governmental use of social media to censor people. According to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, the many surprise…
Relevance: 47% Posted on: November 2, 2014
Click on over to Townhall for what the next Congress — the country's 114th — really needs. Hint: it isn't cowardice. Then come back here for more reading. Breitbart: True The Vote's Lawsuit Against IRS Gets Tossed By Federal Judge NYTimes: Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime…
Relevance: 46% Posted on: August 28, 2013
We are indebted to a publisher of tax information called Tax Analysts for its efforts to make the Internal Revenue Service slightly more accountable. The IRS finds itself beleaguered, sort of, by scandal — the fallout from their practice of impeding applications for tax-exempt status of Tea Party and other…
Relevance: 45% Posted on: March 9, 2015
On Friday I lamented the picking up, by local police, of two children, 10 and 6, for walking home from a local park . . . and the subsequent two-month Montgomery County (Maryland) Child Protective Services investigation, which found the parents “responsible” for “unsubstantiated child neglect.” Left unanswered? Whether parents…
Relevance: 45% Posted on: March 22, 1999
The IRS estimates that the average taxpayer who itemizes will spend 22 hours this year completing tax returns. That's 3 hours more work than last year. The increase is due to the 1,260 changes Congress pushed into the tax code in the past two years. Mention the IRS and most…
Relevance: 45% Posted on: September 16, 2014
Is the Internal Revenue Service inevitable? I’ve often discussed the IRS’s ideologically motivated harassment of taxpayers as fostered by Lois “I Took the Fifth” Lerner (e.g., here and here and here and here). But typical nonpartisan forms of IRS harassment are also deplorable. Consider the so-called “practice” audit, to which…
Relevance: 44% Posted on: June 8, 2013
Oversight is worse in the national security bureaucracy than it is in the IRS: http://youtu.be/whwc6lVZzl4
Relevance: 43% Posted on: September 18, 2000
We were the first country in which a free people created the government. The Constitution that empowered our government also limited it. But Americans weren't satisfied that our rights were protected from tyranny until the Bill of Rights was passed, too. That's why I'm concerned about several stories that suggest…
Relevance: 43% Posted on: May 24, 2013
It was no fun to watch Acting IRS head Steve Miller testify before the House Ways and Means Committee last week. Miller simply had no real explanation for the troubling actions at IRS. Even his terminology induced cringes. Miller’s mea culpa was for “horrific customer service.” Customer service? That’s a…