The IRS scandal has forever discredited the Internal Revenue Service. The scandal is going on two years in length. It began with the notorious Lois Lerner, who headed a division called “The Exempt Organizations Unit.” This was supposed to evaluate applications for tax exemption.
Lerner served for a time on Federal Election Commission, which suggested her interest in electoral politics.
Lerner began her IRS service in 2001 as Director Rulings and Agreements in the Exempt Organizations function of TEGE. [2] In January 2006, she was selected as Director Exempt Organizations. In this capacity, Lerner led an organization of 900 employees responsible for a broad range of compliance activities, including examining the operational and financial activities of exempt organizations, processing applications for tax exemption, providing direction through private letter rulings and technical guidance and providing customer education and outreach to the exempt community.
Here it is apparent that she was promoted by the Bush Administration and was not a political appointee of the Obama people. Why was she involved in this scandal ? The Treasury Department is run by a career Civil Service bureaucracy. Career federal agents and employees are prevented from political partisan activity by The Hatch Act of 1939. Does this work ?
No.
In an event typical of the Obama Administration, a lawsuit has forced disclosure of documents that show political action by Trasurey employees.
In a shocking revelation, the Treasury Inspector General has identified some 2,500 documents that “potentially” show taxpayer information held by the Internal Revenue Service being shared with President Obama’s White House.
The discovery was revealed to the group Cause of Action, which has sued for access to any of the documents. It charges that the IRS and White House have harassed taxpayers.
In an email from the Justice Department’s tax office, an official revealed the high number of documents, suggesting that the White House was hip deep in probes of taxpayers, likely including conservatives and Tea Party groups associated with the IRS scandal.
This is illegal and has been denied for several years by the Administration. At the same time, the Administration has fought to hide documents from critics while sharing them with political allies.
GOP lawmakers have persisted with that theory ever since the IRS inspector general issued a report in May 2013 that said the agency had targeted tax-exempt groups for extra scrutiny based on their names and policy positions. Since then, questions have arisen about former IRS official Lois Lerner communicating with the Justice Department, the FBI and the Federal Elections Commission.
What are the facts ?
Lerner, then-head of the IRS’s tax-exempt division, met with a Justice Department lawyer as a result of that request, according to Cole. “In the course of that meeting it became clear that it would be difficult to bring criminal prosecutions in this area,” the attorney general said.
Cole testified that the IRS did not refer any groups for prosecution, and the Justice Department never opened any investigations as a result of the discussion. But he said the meeting prompted the IRS to provide the FBI with “discs that we understood at the time to contain only public portions of filed returns of tax exempt organizations.” He was referring to the database of 12,000 tax returns.
In fact, the material included tax returns that cannot be used this way.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who heads the House oversight panel, expressed doubts about Cole’s explanation for why the IRS shared the taxpayer information. “You say it’s available publicly but you don’t get it publicly, you go get it from the IRS, and it contains confidential taxpayer donor information,” he said. “All those are facts, correct?”
“They’re not necessarily facts that are all linked together,” Cole replied.
Yes, it was a coincidence. The number of coincidences in this administration is simply amazing.
“This disclosure, following on the heels of TIGTA’s admission that it recovered 30,000 ‘lost’ Lois Lerner emails, renews Cause of Action’s concerns about the decaying professionalism of, and apparent slip into partisanship by, IRS’s senior leadership,” Cause of Action said.
Cause of Action filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit after TIGTA refused to confirm or deny the existence of an independent investigation into former White House senior economics adviser Austan Goolsbee’s alleged unauthorized access to the Koch brother’s tax returns.
Goolsbee, the former White House Council of Economic Advisers chairman, sparked a mini-scandal in 2010 when he told reporters during a background press briefing that Koch Industries—the company of libertarian philanthropists Charles and David Koch—paid no income taxes.
Harry Reid also suggested that he knew that the Koch Brothers do not pay corporate taxes.
“They are known for bankrolling conservative, Libertarian and Tea Party causes and became poster boys for corporate tax reform last year when an Obama Administration official suggested Koch is organized as an S Corp. and so pays no corporate level taxes.”
Low Information Voters may not know what an S Corporation is.
S corporations do not pay any federal income taxes. Instead, the corporation’s income or losses are divided among and passed through to its shareholders. The shareholders must then report the income or loss on their own individual income tax returns.
How does Harry Reid know if the Kochs are incorporated as an S Corporation ?
We may soon know much more about what these people have been up to.
The Lois Lerner e-mails have been found (although probably cleansed of incriminating evidence, like the Rose Law Firm records in the Clinton White House.) and now we have more hidden records about to come out.
Lambrew exchanged confidential taxpayer information on organizations with IRS official Sarah Hall Ingram and White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz, according to 2012 emails obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and provided to The Daily Caller last week. Ingram attempted to counsel Lambrew and the White House on a lawsuit from religious organizations opposing Obamacare’s contraception mandate.
The federal bureaucracy is a Democrat constituency regardless of who the president is. Now they have been given license to run wild.
Tax reformers have been given a good reason to rework the entire federal tax code if we ever get an honest administration again.
Tags: health care, Obama, politics, taxes