Sunday, May 19, 2013

"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy." --Daniel Webster, 1819

Tuesday, the Treasury Inspector General of Tax Administration ("TIGTA") released its report on the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service ("IRS"). The following is a report summary compiled by the Senate Finance Committee Republican staff.

FINDINGS

  • IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of other objective criteria.

  • Ineffective management allowed the following to occur:

  • Inappropriate criteria was developed that stayed in place for more than 18 months.

  • About 1/3 of the applications subjected to additional processing included Tea Party, Patriots or 9/12 in their names.

  • Resulted in substantial delays in processing certain applications.

  • All applications that included the inappropriate criteria experienced substantial delays in processing.

  • The majority of the impacted applications sat without any work done on them for 13 months.

  • 28 applications were withdrawn given the length of time taken to process.

  • 160 out of the 196 applications reviewed by TIGTA were open from 206 to 1138 calendar days which crossed two election cycles and spanned 3 years.

  • Allowed unnecessary information requests to be issued and then later informed some of those groups that they did not need to provide the information which was previously requested.

  • TIGTA determined that the additional information requests sent out to 98 of 170 (58 percent) organizations that received those requests were unnecessary.

The surprise is not that Obama's IRS tried to shut down Tea Party protesters. The surprise is that even the Lame Stream Media is reporting the story. Perhaps, after realizing that they had been totally played by the Administration regarding the Benghazi affair, the propaganda office of the White House, i.e., ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC, have suddenly awoken to realize that No, he doesn't respect them in the morning. And now, with the revelation that the Obama Administration has been reading the phone records of Associated Press reporters the way an overly-protective father might peak into his teenage daughter's diary, perhaps they see that, as they say, It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Over twenty years ago P.J. O'Rourke summed up the problem with Washington best when he said, "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."

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