Free Republic

The Obama administration informed House Speaker John A. Boehner this week it will not prosecute former IRS executive Lois G. Lerner for contempt of Congress, concluding that she did not waive her Fifth Amendment rights to avoid answering questions when she was called to testify nearly two years ago. Ms. Lerner, the figure at the center of the IRS’s tea party targeting scandal, is still facing investigation over the intrusive scrutiny of conservative groups, but the decision by U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen not to pursue the contempt charge approved by the U.S. House does away with at least some of...

John Koskinen, the strange, David Icke-like lizard person currently in charge of the Internal Revenue Service, has told Congress to forget about abolishing the agency: The IRS commissioner on Tuesday brushed aside GOP proposals to abolish his agency, insisting the U.S. would have to have a tax collector one way or another. “You can call them something other than the IRS if that made you feel better,” the agency’s chief, John Koskinen, said after a speech at the National Press Club.Republicans have heaped even more criticism upon the agency than usual over the last 22 months because of its...

No, the title of this article is not hyperbole and yes, the title is accurate. The IRS sometimes has their agents pose as clergymen to deceive church parishioners in attempts to gain information from them surreptitiously. I kid you not. Reverend Patrick Mahoney is the Director for the Christian Defense Coalition and he told the Christian Post that, “It is an absolute disgrace that IRS undercover agents can pose as members of the clergy. It is the role of government to protect religious freedom and the First Amendment, and not to use it to gather information and spy on American...

And none of them make the IRS look very good. This week, the Supreme Court considers King v. Burwell. At issue is whether the IRS exceeded its authority under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by issuing a final IRS rule that expanded the application of the Act’s subsidies and mandates beyond the limits imposed by the statute. King v. Burwell is not a constitutional challenge. It challenges an IRS rule as being inconsistent with the Act it purports to implement. The case is a straightforward question of statutory interpretation. Here are seven things everyone needs to know about...

One of the reasons Republicans like Rep. Mike Kelly from Pennsylvania won’t come forward with the truth about Malik Obama’s tax exempt status and Lois Lerner’s role in it likely has to do with what she was permitted to do when a Republican president was in office. Calling attention to Lerner’s signature being at the bottom of the Barack H. Obama Foundation’s (BHOF) approval letter is certain to cause the Republican Party headaches over its complicity in taking the country to where it is today.Lois Lerner has been caught granting 501(c)(3) tax exempt status to yet another group that should...

There has been a major breakthrough in the case of Malik Obama. It may also help to explain why members of Congress, mainstream media, and shockingly, even the attorneys for Tea Party groups targeted by the IRS have chosen to ignore the earth-shattering scandal involving the President’s eldest brother. This new discovery reveals a mosaic of intrigue that has never before been presented. It’s a scandal with everything… and more......

An IRS employee tasked with trying to restore and obtain emails on Lois Lerner’s IRS computer’s hard drive was legally blind. Stephen Manning, the deputy chief information officer for strategy and modernization at the IRS, submitted an affidavit in the True the Vote vs. IRS litigation regarding the persons and procedures used to attempt to recover Lois Lerner’s hard drive containing emails pertaining to Tea Party targeting. The affidavit can be read here. Paragraph 14 describes the educational background of the person searching for data on Lois Lerner’s hard drive: “According to the Specialist, prior to joining the Internal Revenue...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Investigators said Thursday they have recovered 32,000 emails related to a former IRS official at the heart of the agency's tea party scandal. But they don't know how many of them are new. The emails were to and from Lois Lerner, who used to head the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. Last June, the IRS told Congress it had lost an unknown number of Lerner's email when her computer hard drive crashed in 2011. At the time, IRS officials said the emails could not be recovered. But at a congressional hearing Thursday evening, IRS...

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee announced on Thursday night that hundreds of former IRS official Lois Lerner’s previously “lost” backup tapes have been recovered, which could result in the recovery of a new trove of her emails. IRS Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on Thursday that it took investigators just two weeks to recover 424 backup tapes that were previously said to be unretrievable. “To date, we have found 32,744 unique emails that were backed up from Lois Lerner’s email box. We are in the process of comparing these emails to what...

The White House told Congress last week it refused to dig into its computers for emails that could shed light on what kinds of private taxpayer information the IRS shares with President Obama’s top aides, assuring Congress that the IRS will address the issue — eventually.

Thousands of new Internal Revenue Service employees will not be shouldering the regulatory burden Obamacare rules have heaped onto the tax agency, despite IRS claims that it needed massive additional funding to hire such support staff. Only 483 of the 9,245 new hires President Obama is seeking for the IRS in his 2016 budget proposal would be assigned to work on Obamacare programs, according to a budget summary published by the federal tax agency. As the agency tasked with enforcing Obamacare’s individual mandate provision, the IRS must for the first time this year assess a fine against people who were...

When Carole Hinders answered a knock at the front door of her home in August 2013, she was confronted by two IRS agents. They told her they had just cleaned out the entire bank account of the restaurant, Mrs. Lady’s Mexican Food, that Hinders had owned and operated in tiny Spirit Lake, Iowa, for the past 30 years. The IRS seized more than $32,000. (snip) The aggressive tactics adopted by law enforcement in structuring cases are, perhaps, unsurprising given that the proceeds of forfeited property are funneled back to the very agencies responsible for the forfeiture — an arrangement that...

The IRS has apologized for stealing, or rather seizing, the back accounts of small businesses that did nothing other than deposit an improper amount of cash into their accounts. Pressured by Congress, the IRS has apologized for seizing banks accounts from otherwise law-abiding business owners simply because those owners structured bank transactions to avoid federal reporting requirements. The Associated Press reports “IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told Congress Wednesday that the IRS is changing policies to prevent the seizures, as long as the money came from legal means.” Civil asset forfeiture is a government racket where “suspicious” deposits at one’s banking...

IRS practiced a ‘seize first, ask questions later’ strategyThe Internal Revenue Service seized hundreds of millions of dollars from thousands of bank accounts over the past decade, often without proof of any criminal wrongdoing, according to a report released by the Institute for Justice this week.The Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm, said the IRS practiced a “seize first, ask questions later” strategy when it seized $242 million in more than 2,500 cases from 2005 to 2012.All of those seizures were for “structuring” violations, an obscure rule intended to keep money launderers, terrorists, and other criminals from making small...

U.S. Senate Follows JW Lead on Obamacare FraudObama IRS Obstructs Justice?Election Integrity Battle Moves to Supreme CourtU.S. Senate Follows JW Lead on Obamacare Fraud Someone on Capitol Hill has taken notice of the lawsuit we filed last fall challenging members of Congress who are taking advantage of health benefits they are not entitled to claim. That someone is Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) who now chairs the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee. As a prominent figure in the new Republican majority, Vitter is well-positioned to investigate and expose illegal maneuverings that make it possible for elected officials, and their staff members,...

Commissioner John Koskinen confirmed Tuesday that illegal immigrants granted amnesty from deportation under President Obama’s new policies would be able to get extra refunds from the IRS for money they earned while working illegally, as long as they filed returns during those years. Illegal immigrants who are granted the amnesty will be given official Social Security numbers, which means they can go back and amend up to three years of previous tax forms to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, potentially claiming billions of dollars in additional payments they were ineligible for before the amnesty.

mmigration: Aliens granted executive amnesty by President Obama will be eligible for tax credits for the years they worked here illegally. But wasn't amnesty supposed to benefit the economy and not drain the U.S. Treasury? Subverting the Constitution to grant millions of illegal aliens work permits and freedom from deportation apparently isn't enough for the Obama administration. It now intends, through the Internal Revenue Service, to subvert the tax code to let these illegals collect billions in retroactive Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) payments. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, an unindicted co-conspirator in the cover-up of the IRS Tea Party targeting...

Hundreds of former Internal Revenue Service employees who had a history of misconduct and poor performance on the job were rehired by the tax agency, including some who had committed fraud or falsified documents. The previously cited IRS staff included 141 employees who had problems paying their own taxes, the agency’s inspector general said in a report made public Thursday. Several had “willfully failed to file their federal tax returns,” the report said. The IRS hired more than 7,000 former employees between January 2010 and September 2013. Of the 824 who returned to the agency despite their checkered work history,...

Remember the IRS computer crashes and the hunt for those long destroyed lost emails of Lois Lerner? Rep. Steve Stockman of Texas introduced a bill he called the “The Dog Ate My Tax Receipts Act,” to allow us all to try out some excuses. Rep. Stockman said, “Taxpayers should be allowed to offer the same flimsy, obviously made-up excuses the Obama administration uses.” The bill would allow taxpayers who do not provide documents requested by the IRS to claim one of the following reasons: 1. The dog ate my tax receipts. 2. Convenient, unexplained, miscellaneous computer malfunction. 3. Traded documents...

The IRS has unveiled a secure web application, the International Data Exchange Service (IDES), for cross-border data sharing. IDES will allow Foreign Financial Institutions (FFIs) and tax authorities from other countries to transmit financial data on U.S. taxpayers’ accounts, via an encrypted pathway, to the IRS. The tool is part of the IRS’s effort to track U.S. taxpayer income globally. It is intended to assist FFIs and foreign tax authorities in their compliance with the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). The act requires that financial institutions send to the IRS financial information of American account holders or face...