Tea Party groups, Republicans slam IRS for flagging conservative groups

[John Saxon]

Tea Party leaders refused to accept an apology from the IRS Friday in
which the agency acknowledged that it inappropriately flagged
conservative groups for additional review during the 2012 election to
see if they were violating their tax-exempt status.

Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, said she
wants to see resignations over what she called the "disturbing, illegal
and outrageous abuse of government power."

Republican lawmakers also seized on the acknowledgment, after having
complained about the suspected harassment more than a year ago. Senate
GOP Leader Mitch McConnell called for a "government-wide review" to
assure "these thuggish practices" are not in use elsewhere.

Reaction was swift and harsh after Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS
division that oversees tax-exempt groups, acknowledged the issue at a
conference Friday sponsored by the American Bar Association.

She confirmed that organizations were singled out because they included
the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their applications for tax-exempt
status.

In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, she said.

"That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and
it was inappropriate," Lerner said. "The IRS would like to apologize for
that."

Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in
Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she
told The Associated Press that no high-level IRS officials knew about
the practice. She did not say when they found out.

As conservatives condemned the IRS for the additional scrutiny, IRS
officials after the conference tried to offer a fuller explanation of
what happened.

The IRS put out a written statement saying protocol was changed at the
Cincinnati office in response to the rising number of applications for
501(c)(4) groups. This classification grants tax-exempt status to social
welfare groups. Unlike other charitable groups, these organizations are
allowed to participate in political activities but their primary
activity must be social welfare.

The agents tried to "centralize work" in response to the applications,
the IRS said, leading to problems the agency claims have since been fixed.

"Mistakes were made initially, but they were in no way due to any
political or partisan rationale. We fixed the situation last year and
have made significant progress in moving the centralized cases through
our system," the IRS said.

On a hastily arranged conference call Friday, Lerner said that the
staffers who flagged those groups did so as "short-hand" to deal with
the "great number" of cases in the system.

She acknowledged that some of the letters sent were "far too broad" and
that asking for donors is "generally not what we do."

"We made some mistakes, some people didn't use good judgment," she said,
while claiming the reviews were not partisan.

During the conference earlier Friday, Lerner said the number of groups
filing for the tax-exempt status more than doubled from 2010 to 2012, to
more than 3,400. To handle the influx, the IRS centralized its review of
these applications in the office in Cincinnati. As part of the review,
staffers look for signs that groups are participating in political
activity. If so, IRS agents take a closer look to make sure that
politics isn't the group's primary activity, Lerner said.

In all, about 300 groups were singled out for additional review, Lerner
said. Of those, about a quarter were singled out because they had "tea
party" or "patriot" somewhere in their applications. Lerner said 150 of
the cases have been closed and no group had its tax-exempt status
revoked, though some withdrew their applications.

Many conservative groups complained during the election that they were
being harassed by the IRS. They accused the agency of frustrating their
attempts to become tax exempt by sending them lengthy, intrusive
questionnaires.

The forms, which the groups made available at the time, sought
information about group members' political activities, including details
of their postings on social networking websites and about family members.

Groups shared some of those forms with FoxNews.com back in February
2012, when the complaints first surfaced. In letters sent from IRS
offices in Cincinnati, chapters including the Waco (Texas) Tea Party and
the Ohio Liberty Council were asked to provide a list of donors,
identify volunteers, financial support for and relationships with
political candidates and parties, and even printed copies of their
Facebook pages.

"Some of what they (the IRS) asked was reasonable, but there were some
requests on there that were strange," Toby Marie Walker, president of
the Waco Tea Party, told FoxNews.com last year.

A dozen Republican senators wrote to the IRS in March 2012 expressing
concerns about various accounts that the IRS inquiries were "perceived
to be excessive."

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told Congress in March 2012 that the
IRS was not targeting groups based on their political views.

"There's absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth
that happens to people" who apply for tax-exempt status, Shulman told a
House Ways and Means subcommittee.

On Friday, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said he's "glad" to see the IRS
apologize but said it's not good enough.

"We need to have ironclad guarantees from the IRS that it will adopt
significant protocols to ensure this kind of harassment of groups that
have a constitutional right to express their own views never happens
again," he said, adding that he would be discussing the matter with the
IRS commissioner.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said "the fact that Americans were targeted
by the IRS because of their political beliefs is unconscionable."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Read more:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/10/irs-apologizes-for-targeting-conservative-groups/#ixzz2T0aKLGB2

--
http://www.666themark.com

[Kicking Ass and Taking Names]

On Sat, 11 May 2013 14:03:12 -0400, John Saxon <nulln...@yahoo.com>
wrote:

>
>
>Tea Party leaders refused to accept an apology from the IRS Friday in
>which the agency acknowledged that it inappropriately flagged
>conservative groups for additional review during the 2012 election to
>see if they were violating their tax-exempt status.
>

IRS just doing to Teahadists what Nixon did to Democrats for years and
years.

Apoligze for NOTHING.