The numbers are in: Americans aren’t too thrilled right now with the job performance of the embattled Internal Revenue Service of late.
According to a recent Gallup study, 42 percent of Americans think the IRS is doing a poor job of handling the federal government’s tax collection – more than double what it was the last time the poll was conducted in 2009.
In total, the agency’s overall net rating, which is the number of Americans who have a favorable opinion of the agency minus those who have a negative opinion, has dropped 35 points since 2009. Much of that shift came from people who no longer have a positive opinion of the agency, as only 27 percent of Americans today reported having a positive opinion of the agency – down 14 points from the 2009 study.
Republicans, unsurprisingly, are the most dismayed with the government agency, as the net rating for the organization among GOPers is now at -38 percent.
The IRS has come under major scrutiny over the past few weeks after several top officials admitted to improperly targeting conservative groups and other organizations for extra scrutiny, looking for words like “tea party” and “patriot” in their tax filings and holding up their applications for non-profit status. On Thursday, the agency put Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS division in charge of the department that targeted conservative groups, on administrative leave with pay after she “pled the fifth” in her testimony before Congress earlier in the week.
The study also looked at the favorability ratings of several other top government agencies. Americans were most favorable toward the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Shockingly, Americans only ranked the IRS as its third least-liked agency, besting the Federal Reserve Board and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Gallup telephone study of 1,016 adults nationwide was conducted from May 20-21, 2013. It has a margin of error of +/- four percent at a 95 percent confidence level.
