The scandal surrounding the Internal Revenue Service’s unwarranted scrutiny toward conservative political groups continues to backfire on the government agency with the discovery that numerous Tea Party groups had to wait more than a year before receiving tax-exempt status.
According to a report released by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a conservative non-profit organization which advised many Tea Party affiliated groups in their struggles with the IRS, some of the groups had been ignored by the IRS for as many as 18 to 20 months.
Of course, most of these groups had hoped to be able to operate as tax-exempt organizations, much like President Obama’s controversial Organizing for Action, prior to the 2010 and 2012 elections, when all of their hard work and donations might have actually made a difference.
House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have rightly called for a “government-wide review” to make sure that these partisan “thuggish practices” are not underway elsewhere in the Obama administration. After all, the administration is made of the same faceless, all-powerful bureaucrats who will be making decisions about your healthcare or selecting drone strike targets.
Perhaps Vice-President Joe Biden’s “black helicopter crowds” are on to something!
Moreover, the leaked details of an Inspector General audit to be released early this week paint a more troubling picture than IRS Senior Administrator Lois Lerner let on. In early 2010, IRS specialists were told to look-out for right-leaning applications by examining the materials for any indications of the group’s political leanings. By June 2011, the specialists were also zeroing in on applications for groups which merely criticized how the country is being run.
So far, it does not seem that any IRS employees were fired or disciplined for their part in the scandal.
The report also shows that Ms. Lerner knew about the inappropriate targeting as far back as June 2011, which means that then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, who in March 2012 told Congress that the agency was not targeting conservative groups, was either mistaken or lying.
Recall that over a year ago when Tea Party groups pointed out the apparent abuse by the IRS, the agency and most in the media scoffed at or even encouraged the scrutiny. The IRS may be “sorry” now, but the agency certainly wasn’t in a rush to correct its mistakes once they were discovered by senior managers over two years ago.
