Well, I’ll call shenanigans. How much revenue do you estimate this group had to handle to accumulate $70k in tax liability? All to hold a local educational conference? You know, if exempt status is denied, only actual taxes would be due, not every penny in donations or other revenue the organization ever collected. I’m guessing the estimate is off by at least an order of magnitude
Possible. But delaying tax exempt approval does have consequences, and it’s pretty clear by the tone of the questionnaires that the IRS did not want to grant it. But they couldn’t reject the applications either, because that would have violated the letter of the law. What the IRS actually did only violated the spirit of the law.
Or to put it more accurately, the regulations.
Besides, I’ve actually been involved in some Tea Party stuff, and many of these smaller groups actually aren’t engaged in electioneering. According to the rules, you stay out of electioneering, and you’re golden. What the Tea Party is trying to do goes way beyond mere elections. They are trying to educate and change minds.
Frankly, I don’t think the hurdles to be jumped are high enough. Exempt status is supposed to be granted to organizations that serve the public interest. IMHO, there are too many “charities” whose benefit to the public is highly questionable. I don’t object to the IRS making things tough for applicants.
That said, the standards should be non-partisan, and applied with scrupulous fairness. That’s an aspirational goal, of course, and I accept that in the real world this won’t always be achieved. There’s a continuum between really sleazy and harmful, and pie in the sky. Abuse of the IRS under Nixon occupies one end of this scale. My opinion of these “abuses” puts them somewhere closer to, but short of, the opposite end.
I’d agree that it’s definitely less than what Nixon did, plus it seems to be the fault of a rogue bureaucrat who then tried to throw some of her employees under the bus for doing what she told them to do.
But it does seem to have been intentional, it did do some harm(not earthshattering harm, to be sure), and it does shake the public’s faith that the executive branch is faithfully executing the laws without regard to politics. That’s why we reformed the civil service in the first place so long ago. Bureaucrats on politically-motivated crusades need to be dealt with. At the minimum, she should lose her pension.
Well, she’s already lost her email. You know how much that hurts.
What is this thread doing in Elections?
I swear, I didn’t do it!! I was in Juarez opening a bordello that day. Or something. 
So, this guy got a mean letter from the IRS and refused to comply with it. If he’s denied, he’ll owe $70,000. BUT HE WASN’T DENIED:
What exactly was the harm–that he had to ignore a letter from the IRS? Remember that while his application was in limbo, he was able to function as though he were a 501 organization.
Uh, sure there was. Remember that 501 organizations were originally designed to be apolitical. In the past decade, political organizations have been skating riiiight up to the brink of what’s legally allowable for a 501, and the IRS was getting very worried that some political organizations were incorrectly claiming to be 501 organizations. Look around at UiA’s website and tell me it doesn’t look political to you–go ahead. The IRS targeted folks who looked political and asked questions to figure out if they were sufficiently political to deny them 501 status under law.
Did they overstep? As near as I can tell, they did. Did they overstep in a way designed to create an impossible obstacle? As near as I can tell, they didn’t. Rather, they acted foolishly and incompetently, as near as I can tell.
Of course if this had happened during a Republican administration, I’d accuse them all of personally being Vlad Tepes, so there’s that.
501s can be political, they can’t support or oppose candidates.
Basically, another failed attempt to taint a democratic president with a bullshit scandal. From Whitewater to Benghazi, how much have republicans spent on this nonsense? Smaller government my ass.
Hardly failed. Ever notice the President’s trustworthiness ratings?
Americans deem politicians to be untrustworthy. Republicans fare even worse than the president.
Funny, I was just posting about pathetic smear attempts.
This is an extremely simple way of putting it. Poking around the IRS website rules for c4s, there are literally hundreds of pages* of clarifying documents, precisely due to the issue of c4s sneaking up on that line. (If you tell someone to call that bastard Smith to ask him why he voted for Obamacare, are you opposing a candidate or just promoting social welfare?)
As I said, organizations were deliberately cutting close to the line trying to avoid the legal implications of being a 527 or other political organization. The IRS, in its effort to clarify who was on which side of the line, were carrying out their mission. They did it in an incompetent way, unfortunately.
- to be clear, I mean if you printed the docs out it’d be hundreds of pages, not hundreds of web pages.
Glad you hit it on the head. Barack Obama is a politician, and there was never anything that differentiated him from other politicians.
I’ve never met anyone who thought otherwise. He’s not corrupt, though, no matter how hard the opposition tries to portray him that way.
Not uniquely so. He’s still doing better than Bush and Nixon, although worse than Bush 41, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, and Ford.
Huh… Didn’t we hear this already?
…Oh right, we did!
Someone needs a lesson in context. A President with a 42% approval rating has no political capital. the public is tuning him out. He’s a lame duck.
And one of the reasons he’s a lame duck is because he didn’t do his basic job of managing the federal government. he let it go rogue on him.
His competence ratings are now as low as GWB’s in the wake of Katrina.
Heck of a job, Barry.
I’ll say! Can you believe that his administration hired someone whose staff divided incoming applications between two offices, and that one office processed them faster than the other? If that isn’t grounds for impeachment, nothing is! And the irreparable harm that was suffered by the wounded party, oh my God the humanity! Don’t get me wrong, the Bush administration had faults too. Lying to start a war, being oblivious to people dying in the streets of a major city among others. But that absolutely PALES in comparison to failing to fully staff IRS offices to quickly and efficiently process applications from political organizations pretending to work in the public interest. Criminal, that is!