On Wednesday, May 15, 2013 9:53:41 AM UTC-5, Benghazi - A flavored coffee drink that no one cares about ! wrote:
>
>
> As I suspected, there's both more and less to this than meets the eye.
> I said elsewhere that the IRS has the authority and the duty to investigate
> the eligibility of groups applying for tax-exempt status, and that there isn't
> an issue of illegality unless the IRS directed its attention only to conservative
> groups. Well, here ya go: >
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-15/irs-sent-same-letter-to-democrats-that-fed-tea-party-row.html
> The Internal Revenue Service, under pressure after admitting it targeted anti-tax
> Tea Party groups for scrutiny in recent years, also had its eye on at least three
> Democratic-leaning organizations seeking nonprofit status. It is good to see IRS
> going after tax dodgers !
> -- --- > SAVE AMERICA!! Spay or neuter your VLILLLDM!!
> -- --- > Slow Left-wing thinkers ahead --> Stay to the Right!
>
IRS approved liberal groups while Tea Party in limbo
The controversy over the Internal Revenue Service's targeting conservative groups for additional scrutiny has focused new attention on tax-exempt organizations.
By Gregory Korte, USA TODAY | 2:06 p.m. EDT May 14, 2013
WASHINGTON -- In February 2010, the Champaign Tea Party in Illinois received approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 90 days, no questions asked.
That was the month before the Internal Revenue Service started singling out Tea Party groups for special treatment. There wouldn't be another Tea Party application approved for 27 months.
In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups, a USA TODAY review of IRS data shows.
[STORY: IRS gave liberals a pass; Tea Party groups put on hold
[
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/14/irs-gave-progressives-a-pass-tea-party-groups-put-on-hold/2159983/
As applications from conservative groups sat in limbo, groups with liberal-sounding names had their applications approved in as little as nine months. With names including words like "Progress" or "Progressive," the liberal groups applied for the same tax status and were engaged in the same kinds of activities as the conservative groups. They included:
• Bus for Progress, a New Jersey non-profit that uses a red, white and blue bus to "drive the progressive change." According to its website, its mission includes "support (for) progressive politicians with the courage to serve the people's interests and make tough choices." It got an IRS approval as a social welfare group in April 2011.
• Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment says it fights against corporate welfare and for increasing the minimum wage. "It would be fair to say we're on the progressive end of the spectrum," said executive director Jeff Ordower. He said the group got tax-exempt status in September 2011 in just nine months after "a pretty simple, straightforward process."
• Progress Florida, granted tax-exempt status in January 2011, is lobbying the Florida Legislature to expand Medicaid under a provision of the Affordable Care Act, one of President Obama's signature accomplishments. The group did not return phone calls. "We're busy fighting to build a more progressive Florida and cannot take your call right now," the group's voice mail said.
Like the Tea Party groups, the liberal groups sought recognition as social welfare groups under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, based on activities like "citizen participation" or "voter education and registration."
In a conference call with reporters last week, the IRS official responsible for granting tax-exempt status said that it was a mistake to subject Tea Party groups to additional scrutiny based solely on the organization's name. But she said ideology played no part in the process.
"The selection of these cases where they used the names was not a partisan selection," said Lois Lerner, director of exempt organizations. She said progressive groups were also selected for greater scrutiny based on their names, but did not provide details. "I don't have them off the top of my head," she said.
The IRS did not respond to follow-up questions Tuesday.
Congressional critics say the IRS's actions suggest a political motives: "This administration seems to have a culture of politics above all else," said Rep. Bill Flores, R-Texas. "A lot of the actions they take have a political side first, and put government second."
Flores complained to the IRS last year after the Waco Tea Party's tax-exempt application was mired in red tape. The IRS asked the group for information that was "overreaching and impossible to comply with," Flores said: Transcripts of radio interviews, copies of social media posts and details on "close relationships" with political candidates.
When Flores complained last year -- asking pointed questions about the IRS treatment of Tea Party groups -- the IRS response didn't acknowledge that it had treated conservative groups differently. "They did more than sidestep the issue," he said. "They flipped me the finger."
Before the IRS started separating out Tea Party applications, getting tax-exempt status was routine -- even for conservative groups. The Champaign Tea Party's treasurer, Karen Olsen, said the process was smooth, with no follow-up questions from the IRS.
Olsen, a retired IRS revenue agent, defended the agency.
"If you suddenly see a great increase in some kind of activity, and you don't understand why, then it might be reasonable to look more closely at what's happening with those applications," she said. "I'm not certain that there was an error on the part of the IRS at all. I know that's not a popular opinion."
Some liberal groups did get additional scrutiny, although they still got their tax-exempt status while the Tea Party moratorium was in effect. For the "independent progressive" group Action for a Progressive Future, which runs the Rootsaction.org web site, the tax-exempt process took 18 months and also involved intrusive questions.
Co-founder Jeff Cohen said tax-exempt status is a privilege, so he didn't mind answering the intrusive questions, as long as those questions were consistent and fair.
"From my perspective, if the IRS can hold up legitimate Tea Party applications today and get away with it, then who knows if progressive groups will be held up and specially scrutinized in a few years. It's utterly unacceptable, if that's what happened," he said.
Follow @gregorykorte on Twitter.
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/05/14/irs-tea-party-progressive-groups/2158831/
Now; we understand why this doesn't bother all you VLILLDMs, as you are all for harassing Conservative groups.
BUT; are you for the IRS breaking federal law and sharing private tax information with your "Progressive" (LIBERAL!) groups, too?
Progressive Group: IRS Gave Us Conservative Groups' Confidential Docs
by Wynton Hall 14 May 2013
The progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office that targeted and harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave the progressive group nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was pending.
The commendable admission lends further evidence to the lengths the IRS went during an election cycle to silence tea party and limited government voices.
ProPublica says the documents the IRS gave them were “not supposed to be made public”:
The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year... In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)
The group says that "no unapproved applications from liberal groups were sent to ProPublica.”
According to Media Research Center Vice President for Business and Culture Dan Gainor, ProPublica’s financial backers include top progressive donors:
ProPublica, which recently won its second Pulitzer Prize, initially was given millions of dollars from the Sandler Foundation to “strengthen the progressive infrastructure”–“progressive” being the code word for very liberal. In 2010, it also received a two-year contribution of $125,000 each year from the Open Society Foundations. In case you wonder where that money comes from, the OSF website is
www.soros.org. It is a network of more than 30 international foundations, mostly funded by Soros, who has contributed more than $8 billion to those efforts.
On Friday, the House Ways and Means Committee is scheduled to hold a formal hearing on the IRS conservative targeting scandal. IRS Commissioner Steve Miller and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George are slated to testify.
http://tinyurl.com/IRS-Gate-2013
ProPublica
ProPublica is the brainchild of Herbert and Marion Sandler, the former chief executives of the Golden West Financial Corporation, who have committed $10 million a year to the project.[8] The Sandlers hired Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, to create and run the organization as editor in chief. At the time ProPublica was set up, Steiger responded to concerns about the role of the Sandlers' political views, saying on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer:
“Coming into this, when I talked to Herb and Marion Sandler,
one of my concerns was precisely this question of independence
and nonpartisanship... My history has been doing 'down the middle'
reporting. And so when I talked to Herb and Marion I said 'are you
comfortable with that?' They said 'absolutely'. I said 'well suppose
we did an expose of some of the left leaning organizations that you
have supported or that are friendly to what you've supported in the
past'. They said 'no problem'. And when we set up our organizational
structure, the board of directors, on which I sit and which Herb is the
chairman, does not know in advance what we're going to report on.”
Criticism
Dave Kopel, a policy analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute and a former columnist for the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News, criticized a ProPublica report on hydraulic fracturing as a "one-sided series of facts arrayed to support a point of view". He argued that a common theme in ProPublica's work is that "the government is not doing a good enough job in controlling things, particularly things involving big business". ProPublica later responded to his article, countering those claims and saying quote, "using carefully culled quotations and selected statistics, Kopel asserts 'indisputably false facts' in ProPublica's reporting."
After the fallout from the IRS admitting to targeting conservative tax exempt groups for added scrutiny, ProPublica said that it had received confidential pending applications for groups requesting tax exempt status. ProPublica said it had requested the applications for 67 different nonprofits and received nine "applications (that) had not yet been approved — meaning they were not supposed to be made public."
Board members
Herbert Sandler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Sandler
Paul Steiger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Steiger
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates,_Jr.
Mary Graham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Graham
Alberto Ibargüen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Ibarg%C3%BCen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica