IRS TARGETED PRO-BORDER SECURITY GROUPS FOR ILLEGALSCRUTINY: AUDIT

IRS targeted pro-border security groups for illegal scrutiny: Audit

Report says abusive scrutiny went beyond tea party, included liberal groups

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Thursday, October 5, 2017

The IRS singled out pro-border security groups for intrusive scrutiny along with tea party, conservative, Occupy movement and progressive organizations, the tax agency’s inspector general said in a new audit Thursday that says political targeting went even deeper than first suspected.

Dozens of liberal groups were snared by the scrutiny from 2004 through 2013, and so were groups that dealt with specific issues such as immigration, health care or marijuana legalization, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said.

They faced delays in having their nonprofit status applications approved. Many also were subjected to intrusive questions about their political beliefs, donor lists and even their activities at their regular jobs, the audit said.

The targeting wasn’t as severe as the tea party, with the number “significantly less” than the conservatives who faced scrutiny, investigators said.

But so-called “Occupy” groups, rank-and-file “progressive” groups, and successors to ACORN, the liberal community organizer, were among those flagged based on names or other triggers, TIGTA said.

Democrats seized on the report as confirmation that there was no political bias in the IRS under the Obama administration, saying the bad behavior was universal.

“This was a case, as I said in the beginning, of gross mismanagement at the IRS, not political targeting,” said Rep. Sander Levin, ranking Democrat on the chief tax oversight committee in the House. “But that’s not the political narrative the Republicans wanted, so they selectively ignored important facts to skew their ‘investigation.’”

Still, Democrats said the report did confirm bungling at the tax agency, which the new audit said stretched back for years, and affected hundreds of groups.

Republicans said that still confirms their suspicions that the agency was operating beyond the law in targeting groups for their political beliefs.

“This report reinforces what government watchdogs and congressional investigators have confirmed time and time again: bureaucrats at the IRS, such as Lois Lerner, arbitrarily and haphazardly administered the tax code and targeted taxpayers based on political ideology,” said House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, Texas Republican.

The new audit follows the original 2013 TIGTA report that spotted the illegal targeting of conservative groups, which were pulled out of the usual processing based on conservative-sounding names like including the word “patriot.”

Members of Congress asked investigators to go back and see what other inappropriate screens the IRS used, and Thursday’s report was the result.

Groups related to the Occupy movement, some health care organizations, medical marijuana advocates, and even groups that wanted a crackdown on illegal immigration — essentially advocating for enforcement of existing law.

The TIGTA report redacted the names of the seven “Border Patrol” groups targeted, and said the IRS was unable to say why it went after them beginning in 2006.

Some 14 groups that were deemed to have sprouted out of the ACORN organization were also snared in the targeting. In those cases, the IRS said, they were targeted because the parent organization had been under federal investigation for years for voter and election fraud.

Nearly half of the ACORN-related groups faced long delays and were asked inappropriate questions.

Those questions may have included names of donors, details on people who attended meetings, demands that group officials disclose their own political leanings and plans, and inquiries about their other work.

In one troubling appendix to the report, the inspector general says the IRS was unable to produce files for eight of the groups investigators were tracking.

Investigators said that inappropriate behavior spanned at least the period from 2004 to 2013, and the agency used more than 250 criteria to single applications out for extra review. Some 17 of those criteria seemed to be centered on politics, the audit said, snaring at least 83 different groups.

By contrast, more than 400 mostly conservative groups were deemed to have been snared by the anti-tea party targeting that spanned 2009 to 2013.

The IRS, in its official response to the report, said the issue was in the past.

“Since the time period covered by the report, the IRS has made significant changes in the way we handle the review process for tax-exempt applications,” said Sunita B. Lough, commissioner for the tax-exempt entities division at the IRS.

The commissioner said that includes no longer asking for donor information.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/5/irs-targeted-pro-border-security-groups-audit/?

My comments: We have a LEFTIST, Criminal IRS, that President Trump must put a stop to, if Middle America is to ever have Trust in it.