Senate Report Cites I.R.S. Mismanagement in Targeting of Tea Party Groups

[alp227]

Source: NY Times

WASHINGTON — A Senate committee on Wednesday closed a two-year investigation with unanimous agreement that mismanagement at the Internal Revenue Service led it to improperly target conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. But a report by the panel did not suggest that any laws were broken, and Republicans and Democrats were divided over whether White House politics was behind the problems.

“This bipartisan investigation shows gross mismanagement at the highest levels of the I.R.S. and confirms an unacceptable truth: that the I.R.S. is prone to abuse,” Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement after his panel voted behind closed doors to release the report of more than 400 pages.

Mr. Hatch added that “the committee found evidence that the administration’s political agenda guided the I.R.S.’s actions with respect to their treatment of conservative groups.” But the committee’s senior Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, said in the same news release that the inquiry had found “pure bureaucratic mismanagement without any evidence of political interference.”

“Groups on both sides of the political spectrum were treated equally in their efforts to secure tax-exempt status,” Mr. Wyden said.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/06/us/politics/senate-report-cites-irs-mismanagement-in-targeting-of-tea-party-groups.html

[ericson00]

1. this is why no presidential candidate ought to be subject

to attacks that they're "unelectable" because of witch hunts, IDC if their name is Hillary, Bernie, or Joe. Benghazi, IRS, Whitewater, Email Servers, its all GOP witch hunt garbage. Any Democrat who gets the nomination will be called "scandalous" and their numbers will be under attack. If not currently low, they will get this stuff in the news and try to hurt them.

[riversedge]

2. So, in other words-with the help of Hatch--Fox news will continue to lie and

say conservatives groups were targeted only.

[Stevepol]

3. The problem, as I see it, for the IRS is

that it is trying to decide if organizations are political or not. If they're like me and I know we're understaffed, I will use Google to speed up the process of finding the political orgs. Now one of the red flags for a "political" organizations I would think is "tea party." But no. According to the tea parties, they are not primarily a political organization; they're a "social" organization. They have potluck dinners and enjoy one another's company I presume but they don't do anything "political."

Am I wrong about this? The IRS has been mandated with the task of administering the law that does not allow political orgs to be tax exempt. So they are supposed to ignore the "tea party" orgs and NOT treat them as political orgs?

When I watched some of these committee meetings earlier, I really felt I was inside an asylum or some place where things were being decided on whim and bluster and even rudimentary logic or reason was out the window.