It’s the unapproved applications that would be illegal in this case.
Right. They seem to have requested 67 applications, and received 31 back, nine of which were still pending. They don’t seem to know why the IRS sent them the ones they did.
They can dish out information like it’s water over Niagara Falls when asked. Shouldn’t be a problem for them to respond to Congressional inquires.
JFTR, you turn it off by turning off your computer’s speaker…
I haven’t read the whole thread, and just came in to ask: Has anyone looked at whether the secret source that Harry Reid had concerning Romney’s taxes might have been the people involved in this malfeasance?
Thing is, a lot of the “Tea Party” groups really are “grass roots” orgs springing up out in the hinterland, back when that whole meme metastasized into a “movement”. Be a good bet that a bunch of them have simply vanished or been absorbed by some larger entity. At any rate, what I’m getting at is that an unknown number and an unknown proportion of newly minted “social welfare” groups have sprung up, and the greater majority of them are “conservative” or “Tea Party”.
Then you have your “social welfare” groups who, like Dick Armey’s Tea Party Express, are wholly owned subsidiaries of The Moloch Group. Who’s benefactors would very much like to pretend that they too are “grass roots” orgs sprung up from the common people and would very much like to avoid having to reveal where the money comes from.
Now, lets suppose you are a master of Google-fu, arguing here on Da Boards. Lets say you want to submit a thorough listing of all the “Tea Party” groups and sub-groups. What search terms are you likely to use? Keeping in mind that many of them are quite small and didn’t exist ten years ago. Wouldn’t you be doing much the same sort of searching?
If you were an utterly unbiased person, a saint of the highest Broderism, doing searches based on 501©4 groups that have sprung up recently, isn’t it obvious that your results would appear to be biased, simply because of the number of such “Tea Party” groups that have sprung up so recently?
If you work for the IRS and are tasked with ferreting out such information, and you got a pile of such applications on your desk, how likely is it that the greater majority of the applications on your desk come from such “TP” groups? Further, how likely is it that many such groups, given their public animus towards the gummint, were less that entirely forthcoming with the IRS? And those are likely to be the ones I would think “legitimate”, genuine grass roots movements, and not front groups for fat cats?
And lastly, “inconvenience”? “Uncertainty”? This is the crushing jackboot of the Obama Oppression Machine?
Nobody knows if Reid actually had a source and this seems to be a different part of the IRS, so I don’t think anyone has looked into it.
Despite the fact that you are such an original thinker, odds are good that the notion has occurred to someone else of like mind. Odds would be better, of course, if you had an operational hive mind like the left, rather than being a bunch of independent thinkers like you are. But yeah, you can bet they looked.
And if you didn’t hear anything, what does that suggest about what they found? They found a huge bombshell to blow up Obama, and Fox News and Blightbart covered it up?
If you’d like to attempt to insult me, what don’t you take it to the pit and do so less obliquely and weasely?
I’m pretty sure Romney doesn’t file taxes in or anywhere near Cincinnati.
???
So what?
I don’t recall any portion of the rules regarding non-profits that insisted that they had to be entirely independent groups. There are numerous non-profits that have been founded by for-profit groups and for-profits spun off from non-profits specifically to allow different activities of the larger group to act under separate rules to achieve their goals. The Koch’s, for example, already have the for-profit Americans For Prosperity and the non-profit Freedom Works. The IRS has made no effort to shut down the non-profit because it is acting under the law, even if its goals are pretty much identical to the AFP. If a group submits the correct paperwork to the IRS that indicates that they have formed for some purpose that is a legitimately sanctioned purpose under Federal law, then the IRS should simply examine that paperwork in the same way that they examine all such submissions and act accordingly. Explicitly delaying approval of non-profit status because some functionary in the IRS does not approve of their goals is wrong.
If their stated goal does not conform to the rules for non-profits, they can be denied. If they turn out to be abusers of some aspect of the law, then the heavy club of the IRS is still there to wreak vengeance.
This action was wrong, (as has already been pointed out by the Inspector General), and it should not be tolerated.
The only aspect of this situation from which the public can take any comfort, (and not so much of that), is that it appears to have been initiated by just a couple of IRS regions at the local level as opposed to having been directed from the top or from outside the IRS as happened when Nixon’s administration used the IRS to attack opponents.
It’s important to note that 501(c)(4) organizations are free to lobby and engage in general advocacy. What they can not do is engage in anything more than limited political campaign intervention.
From the IG report:
So an organization whose stated purpose is to lobby for smaller government, lobby against taxes, educate people about the constitution or bill of rights, all of those things are perfectly within the scope of a 501(c)(4) organization. Yet those were singled out. The IRS was clearly wrong and acted inappropriately here.
The amount of mental gymnastics required to defend the IRS in this case is telling.
:: post snipped ::
Why this is a wonderful idea. Why don’t we use it everywhere?
For example, we could use it in law enforcement. Since, percentage wise, blacks have a much higher incarceration rate it would only make sense, using your logic, that we ought to target blacks for law enforcement [del]harassment [/del] scrutiny.
Or we could apply all of our laws impartially.
Slee
As much as I’m a giant fan of “don’t be a jerk” as a strategy for moderating a messageboard, and as much as I dislike having to have details and details spelling out what it means to be a jerk, I think what works on a messageboard doesn’t work for a federal bureaucracy.
Sure, the Tea Party folks are jerks in my opinion*. But if bureaucrats were using the fact that TPers were jerks to choose who to scrutinize, that’s not okay.
This really seems like a case where the devil is in the details.
- I’m putting it extra-harshly for the sake of argument; of course there are some TPers who are lovely people**.
** I’m putting it extra-mildly for the sake of argument.
Not sure everybody is connecting the dots here. If you apply for tax free status and are approved that information becomes public. If the IRS asks for information that is not relevant that becomes public. It then becomes very easy to feed information about political supporters you disagree with to those people who would like such extraneous information.
when it’s discovered it’s denied by anybody who matters politically. This is what has happened to not just the Tea Party but to other groups as well. Not only that, but the IRS released information on groups that were in the process of applying. This was not public information. It was illegal. So far the only thing that’s been done about it is to apologize.
I think this is a problem that needs to be corrected now before it becomes another arrow in the quiver of each administration that follows.
Can anyone identify what the specific relevant laws are here?
While I agree it shouldn’t have been done, given the state of the laws, I think the best solution is sunlight: any group that has tax-exempt status is essentially asking for subsidization of their organization by the public, so their books should be open. If you want to make a donation to that group, it ought to be totally clear who’s supporting you.
From our good friends at Daily Kos, an alternative viewpoint which says what I was trying to say much better than I did, and has information that I did not. I would have to cut and paste the entire thing, really, or just artfully leave out enough to pass muster.
The following quote is offered as bait to get you there:
The whole thing isn’t that long, give it a gander.
The below isn’t meant as a gotcha question and if the answer is “yes” I won’t get mad or accusing you of being a bigot.
Based on the article’s logic if a bunch of groups start signing up, all with the word “Muslim” in them, then they should be targeted for extra scrutiny.
Is that your position?
Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’m reasonably certain that you’d strongly object, particularly since many have used the same logic to go after your own Congressman, Keith Ellison.
Why, of course not, but I’m totally a hypocrite. Thanks for asking the non-gotcha question.