Posted on 05/19/2013 5:41:58 AM PDT by Pharmboy
During the summer of 2010, the dozen or so accountants and tax agents of Group 7822 of the Internal Revenue Service office in Cincinnati got a directive from their manager. A growing number of organizations identifying themselves as part of the Tea Party had begun applying for tax exemptions, the manager said, advising the workers to be on the lookout for them and other groups planning to get involved in elections.
“I don’t believe there’s any such thing as rogue agents,” said Bonnie Esrig, a former senior manager in the I.R.S. office in Cincinnati.
The specialists, hunched over laptops on the office’s fourth floor, rarely discussed politics, one former supervisor said. Low-level employees in what many in the I.R.S. consider a backwater, they processed thousands of applications a year, mostly from charities like private schools or hospitals.
For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words like “patriots,” “we the people” — as a way to search efficiently through the flood of applications for groups that might not quality for exemptions, according to the I.R.S. inspector general. “Triage,” the agency’s acting chief described it.
As a grim-faced President Obama denounced the “inexcusable” actions of the I.R.S. last week and lawmakers of both parties lined up in Washington on Friday to accuse it of an array of misconduct, everything seemed so clear: the nation’s tax agency had deliberately targeted conservative activists, violating the public trust — and perhaps the law.
While there are still many gaps in the story of how the I.R.S. scandal happened, interviews with current and former employees and with lawyers who dealt with them, along with a review of I.R.S. documents, paint a more muddled...alienated from the broader I.R.S. culture and given little direction.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I think you are too trusting. They gave this to one agent because they wanted the Tea Party groups and other right-of-center groups to have to wait and wait and wait...
Boom there it is. Target the right.
For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words like “patriots,” “we the people” — as a way to search efficiently through the flood of applications for groups that might not qualify for exemptions, according to the I.R.S. inspector general. “Triage,” the agency’s acting chief described it.
Yeah, it was a triage to stop the Tea-Party and ANY other organizations that weren't leftist, union, or pro-Obama/Democrats.
That poor, poor LONE SPECIALIST hunched over his laptop who rarely discussed politics.
Do they let him out occasionally? It must be tough on this non-existent person searching for people using words like patriot and constitution. Oh the horror.
Maybe the could transfer the poor bloke to the section where they keyword applications for "social justice", "progressive", or "Kenyan-loving muslim brotherhood." I'm sure there is no backlog in that division.
This is equivalent to a referee in a boxing match pinning one boxers arms back and saying:
“Well, how else were we going to block his punches?”
Of course they ALL knew it from the top on down. They picked the keywords. It’s all self-evident.
KEYWORDS. End of story.
Don’t forget the intrusive questionnaires that—to my knowledge—none of the leftwing groups ever had to answer.
As opposed to this illegitimate enforcement?
And what of all the “special attention” and searches related to the word “occupy” that must have been flooding in around the same time?
They are so confused by direct deposit of large bonuses.
Yeah, it's such a non-scandal that the Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller and Lois Lerner, IRS director of tax exempt organizations, had to devise a scheme to plant a question in a Q and A session at an American Bar Association conference to release the news.
Did this inadequate or incapable staff also contact other government agencies to harass and intimidate? That lone specialist sure is a busy guy.
IRS wasn’t only agency hassling True the Vote
http://watchdog.org/85047/irs-wasnt-only-agency-hassling-true-the-vote/
Since filing for tax exemption as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2010, the founders of True the Vote, a Houston-based group that tries to prevent elections fraud, have been overwhelmed with scrutiny from a host of government agencies, in particular, by the Internal Revenue Service.
Catherine and Bryan Englebrecht have suffered through 18 separate encounters with five government agencies, from surprise audits to FBI visits to never-ending demands for paperwork.
The government has been scrutinizing True the Vote, the Engelbrechts’ tea party group, which is called King Street Patriots, and the family’s oil services manufacturing business.
True the Vote spokesman Logan Churchwell sent Watchdog.org a timeline of the encounters, which include two unscheduled audits by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, six visits or phone calls by the Federal Bureau of Investigation looking for domestic terrorists, five rounds of questioning by the IRS over True the Vote’s application and one round over King Street Patriot’s application, both of which were filed in July 2010, and neither of which has been approved yet.
Yeeeeech. Too many Kool-Aid drinkers. Man, liberals are stupid.
Ohio was ground zero for these attempts to depress the conservative vote because Ohio is where the election would be won or list.
Look for Jarrett’s fingerprints to be all over the Ohio mess in days to come.
Someone had to come up with those questions in written form. I want to know the fascist that wanted to know the content of one organizations prayers.
That would be the supervisor. Government drones in jobs like this are not allowed to think. They shuffle paper. This rot starts at the top and I believe it will come out that they purposely did not assign needed resources to get the job done using the inefficiency for the desired result.
Mark my words... that is the excuse they are using now and that will be the excuse coming out of the hearings. “We only budgeted one person to handles these and he/she was overwhelmed with the number of applications.”
That was part of what I was trying to say if it was not clear. It’s the supervisors and the responsibility falls on them. A person or persons in the chain of command saw what was happening and encouraged it. The extra questions and other layers of crap they put people through was inexcusable. Again, that comes from a GS-teen level person - not a drone in a cubicle.
That is the danger of big government that has partisan people in charge - they can use the bureaucracy to achieve the desired result.
MoveOn.org Civic Action is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation and was formerly known as MoveOn.org.
MoveOn is a web-based liberal advocacy organization that raises tens of millions of dollars for Democratic Party politicians and causes from the millions of people on its e-mail list.
MoveOn funds or sponsors with other liberal advocacy organizations various coalitions such as Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), SavetheInternet.com Coalition, and Win Without War.
It endorsed Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic Party primaries, fundraised and organized for him, and has become perhaps the lead lobby organization for his policies in 2009, apart from Obama’s own Organizing for America. MO is a member of Health Care for America Now. It is formally allied with 350.org
See 53. I am not disagreeing with your points and I think there should be criminal prosecutions. I think it’s the supervisors and people in charge that should be prosecuted. Drones do what they are directed to do and people reviewing applications don’t have authority to “harass” people without direction from supervisors and/or permission from lawyers. Don’t forget the attorneys who are IRS counsel. They would have had to sign off on this too because they review everything.
They are going to try and blame the drones. It’s what they do in the Federal government today - protect management at all costs. Criminal charges against those supervisors makes it more likely that someone will talk. The next phase will be to blame the drones or lowest level supervisors. This did not originate with them - no way. Legal counsel would not have let this go on when they reviewed applications. I am not a lawyer and I can see how ridiculous some of these questions are.
The Soros-funded Media Matters is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt org
Media Matters for America (MMfA) is a politically progressive media watchdog group that says it is “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media”.
Set up as a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization, MMfA was founded in 2004 by journalist and author David Brock. Eric E. Burns served as MMfA’s president until 2011.
In March 2011, Media Matters declared open war on Fox. The war includes undermining, sabotaging and collecting embarrassing data on top and mid-level executives at NewsCorp. Politico reported that the attacks would be limited to Fox, NewsCorp and a few conservative sites.
David Brock, founder of Media Matters, is known to have close ties with the White House. An investigation by the Daily Caller revealed that statements which appeared in emails from Media Matters turned up verbatim in Obama’s speeches immediately after. The Justice Department also appears to have used their talking points in the Fast & Furious investigation.
According to the Daily Caller, Obama meets regularly with the Media Matters group to feed his slanted “information” to news outlets which include “respected” journalists. The plan is to infiltrate, disrupt, and destroy the “enemy” via private detectives.
Media Matters has allegedly fed inaccurate stories to the mainstream media – they throw stories out and whatever sticks, sticks, with little regard for the person they are destroying! Daily Caller
Their list of donors shows that Soros-funded groups and other far-leftists are on the list. Penny Pitzger, Obama’s nominee for Commerce Secretary, is one of them.
Read the opinion of the liberal Alan Dershowitz about Media Matters and Center for American Progress (they provide Obama’s blueprints for most of what he does). Dershowitz describes them as Stalinesque -
“Media Matters and Center for American Progress are two extremely left-bigoted groups that are so virulently anti-Israel and anti-supporters of Israel that they’ve gone over the line from anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism,” Dershowitz said. ”They now use the term ‘Israel firsters,’ the way anti-Catholic bigots used to use the term ‘Vatican firsters’ or ‘Irish firsters,’ as if to suggest Americans who support Israel have dual loyalty. This false charge goes back to the Bible — goes back to the Book of Esther, goes back thousands of years. It was one of Hitler’s justifications for killing the Jews: ‘Dual loyalty, they’re not good Germans, they’re not good Americans,’ whatever it is.” Daily Caller
Media Matters has tax exempt status and you get to pay for their unscrupulous activities!
Former chief of staff to president Bill Clinton John Podesta provided office space for Media Matters early in its formation at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank that he had created in 2002.
Hillary Clinton advised Media Matters in its early stages out of a belief that progressives should follow conservatives in forming think tanks and advocacy groups to support their political goals.
‘‘The IRS is pretty dysfunctional to begin with, and this case brought all those dysfunctions to their worst,’’ said Paul Streckfus, a former IRS employee who runs a newsletter devoted to tax-exempt organizations. ‘‘People were coming and going, asking for advice and not getting it, and sometimes forgetting the cases existed.’’
We can fix that problem by eliminating the IRS ENTIRELY, especially when former employees know it is dysfunctional! I deal with these idiots on a weekly basis so I completely agree it is dysfunctional and especially because they hire idiots who can’t be fired EVER no matter how much they screw up.
Sorta like the idiot who claims to be running the country but knows nothing about nothing, just ask him.
This isn’t just dysfunctional idiots though, this is political payback like we have never seen before, period, coming from the top.
No IRS scrutiny over these tax exempt organizations...
Priorities USA, made up of former Barack Obama campaign aides, and American Bridge 21st Century Foundation, an opposition research group led by a former adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Administering the nearly 4-million-word federal tax code involves so many arcane legalities, and is so fraught with potential to ignite Washington’s partisan skirmishes or infuriate taxpayers, that much of the IRS is run by lawyers
http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/IRS-outpost-at-center-of-storm-4528502.php#ixzz2TluAqPhd
And we wonder why we are screwed?
You know it’s total baloney when they use the word “efficiency” to describe a government agency.
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