The real IRS scandal

[hue]

http://onmilwaukee.com/buzz/articles/irsscandal.html

Published July 1, 2014 at 3:02 p.m.
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For more than a year now, the conservative outrage machine has had its sights squarely on the Internal Revenue Service. I mean, among other things; the conservative outrage machine is an accomplished multi-tasker, so the IRS has had to compete with Benghazi and Fast and Furious and the machine's continuing surprise that a U.S. president enjoys golf.

The IRS scandal goes like this: The IRS applied extra scrutiny to an explosion of supposed tax-exempt groups starting in about 2010. The scrutiny was applied to both liberal and conservative groups, but the conservative groups complained that they were being unfairly targeted. To date, only one group, identified as a Democratic or liberal group, had its tax-exempt status revoked, although to be fair, the delays suffered by all those groups, including the conservative ones, were unreasonable. But I'll come back to that in a moment.

When this story broke in 2013, the conservative outrage machine then insisted that all those groups that were stalled by the IRS might have changed the outcome of the 2012 election. This is self-refuting logic, of course; if the groups were eligible for tax-exemption, they could not have been political or affected the election, and if they were political, they should have gotten the higher scrutiny and been denied tax-exempt status.

And to complicate things, we learned in June that some of the emails from the then-head of the IRS Exempt Organizations division, Lois Lerner, were missing, because her computer crashed and was unrecoverable. That would sound really, really suspicious -- and the conservative outrage machine has been in tremendously high dudgeon about it -- if that crash hadn't happened in 2011.

[mwooldri]

1. Seems like a simple solution here... hire more IRS employees.

If the IRS could collect an additional $360 billion, wouldn't it be worth it to get more people involved? They don't necessarily have to do the hiring themselves... contract out some of the more mundane stuff and retrain the displaced IRS employees in more specialist areas... like checking those 501(c) applications.

It's like "oh look, I found a quarter on the ground - lucky me!" but not realizing that earlier on that day you paid for something costing $100 but you gave the person $200 and that person didn't spot it.

It's not just the IRS that has this problem. Private companies often find that cutting staff in the short term can help increase profits quickly but also not realising the loss of the employees costs them more in the long run.