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if it's done evenhandedly, no problem. is that the case?
The year 2010 gave us Citizens United. Suddenly corporations were people who had the right of free speech. But corporations didn't want their free speech to be disclosed. Enter the Koch Bros., Armey and Freedom Works. In their basement lab, they concocted the very first para-political party, the Tea Party, disguised as a social welfare agency, a 501(c)4. Tea Party Groups were mysteriously born all over the US. Not surprisingly, people and the media began howling loudly that the Tea Party was a wholly political en y that should be a 527 en y for IRS purposes. The media mysteriously seems to have forgotten all this.
Again not surprisingly the IRS began to question this rash of new applicants. That's how you make a determination. But ah, the Koch Bros were ready. In March 2012 a conservative legal foundation, the Landmark Legal Foundation filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Treasury that the Tea Party groups were being unfairly targeted.
http://www.landmarklegal.org/uploads...ttachments.pdf
Shortly thereafter the IRS systematically changed its procedures to avoid the appearance of targeting. Also shortly after, Congress made substantial bi-partisan inquiries into the matter, including conducting an investigation. They also concluded that unless/until the rules are changed, there can be no appearance of targeting.
http://do ents.jdsupra.com/70eadcc1-e046-407f-8e...
So the Tea Party which is a 100% political organization can pretend it is a social welfare agency until the rules are changed by Congress. To fault IRS workers who were responding to complaints is an ex post facto re-investigation of something that has already been examined and addressed.
It must be Ground Hog Day.
The media mysteriously seems to have forgotten all this.
http://www.landmarklegal.org/uploads...ttachments.pdf
http://www.landmarklegal.org/uploads...ttachments.pdf
In order to claim that targeting these conservative groups was politically motivated, republicans have to agree that these groups applying for the 501(c)4 tax-exemption were, in fact, political, and illegally trying to skirt a tax law that republicans regularly defend. When applying for these statuses, an organization has to prove it is the type of organization to which the exemption applies. Why wouldn't there be reason to look into it carefully if the name has a political bent to it?
if it's done evenhandedly, no problem. is that the case?
yes, of course.
Vetting is required by the IRS regs to grant tax exemption, vetting only "Tea Bagger" or "Patriot" is.
Chris Hayes explained clearly how ty the rule is, how hard it is to define where the line where "too much political" is. Calling Rove, tea bagger, patriot orgs non-political and "social welfare" is Orwellian language abuse.
IRS scandal points to budget crunch
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ee902cea-b...#axzz2TaHuNVL8
btw, tea party / patriot applications were only about of 1/3 of all applicatons, so they weren't singled out. YES, BOGUS IRS scandal
Policing Tax Evasion Could Save Billions, But Republicans Won't Fund Enforcement
In February, the Obama administration requested $339.3 million in additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service in 2012 to chase this costly tax evasion. According to the IRS, that extra funding would be paid back twice over with the additional revenue brought in through enforcement.
Most outside economists agree.
"There is no question that the IRS agents are able to produce enough extra revenue to be a good return on that investment," said Wayne Angell, a conservative economist who is a former governor of the Federal Reserve Board and has previously worked for Bear Stearns.
Yet instead of supporting increased enforcement, the GOP has been trying to cut IRS funding. In March, the House GOP sought to strip $600 million from the IRS budget as part of the continuing budget resolution. IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman told a house subcommittee those cuts would cost the government $4 billion in lost revenue. The final budget deal left the tax collection agency's annualized budget unchanged at $12.1 billion, $486 million less than the Obama administration had requested.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_850243.html
stopping criminal tax evasion is apparently seen as a hated "tax hike" by the Repugs
IRS nonprofit division overloaded, understaffed
Amid withering accusations the Internal Revenue Service targeted tea party and other conservative groups with enhanced scrutiny, the agency faces another problem: it’s drowning in paperwork.
The IRS’ Exempt Organizations Division, which finds itself at the scandal’s epicenter, processed significantly more tax exemption applications in fiscal year 2012 by so-called 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations — 2,774 — than it has since at least the late 1990s, according to an analysis of IRS records by the Center for Public Integrity.
Compare that to 1,777 applications in 2011 and 1,741 in 2010, federal records show. Not since 2002, when officials processed 2,402 applications, have so many been received.
Meanwhile, Exempt Organizations Division staffing slid from 910 employees during fiscal year 2009 to 876 during fiscal year 2012, agency personnel do ents indicate.
In 2010, IRS officials projected exempt division staffing at 942 employees. But IRS officials cut the number to 900 after the agency began slashing its budget in response to fiscal woes affecting most corners of the federal government.
The agency said this weekend that a heavy workload prompted bureaucrats to “centralize” the “influx of advocacy applications” and, in the name of efficiency, scrutinize groups that contained more common phrases such as “tea party” in them.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/...=publici-email
How the IRS’s Nonprofit Division Got So Dysfunctional
Moves launched in the 1990s were designed to streamline the tax agency and make it more efficient. But they had unintended consequences for the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division.
Checks and balances once in place were taken away. Guidance frequently published by the IRS and closely read by tax lawyers and nonprofits disappeared. Even as political activity by social welfare nonprofits exploded in recent election cycles, repeated requests for the IRS to clarify exactly what was permitted for the secretly funded groups were met, at least publicly, with silence.
All this combined to create an isolated office in Cincinnati, plagued by what an inspector general this week described as “insufficient oversight,” of fewer than 200 low-level employees responsible for reviewing more than 60,000 nonprofit applications a year.
In the end, this contributed to what everyone from Republican lawmakers to the president says was a major mistake: The decision by the Ohio unit to flag for further review applications from groups with “Tea Party” and similar labels. This started around March 2010, with little pushback from Washington until the end of June 2011.
“It’s really no surprise that a number of these cases blew up on the IRS,” said Marcus Owens, who ran the Exempt Organizations division from 1990 to 2000. “They had eliminated the trip wires of 25 years.”
http://www.propublica.org/article/ho...-dysfunctional
Dan...
You are an absolute idiot.
See:
link: Internal Revenue Service Scrutiny of Non-profit Groups, Part 1, May 17, 2013 1 hour, 38 minutes
link: Internal Revenue Service Scrutiny of Non-profit Groups, Part 2, May 17, 2013 1 hour, 52 minutes
coming from an absolute idiot..lol
6 Key Takeaways From the Stupidity and Reality of IRS 'Scandal'
1. The IRS made mistakes with both parties.
The scandal mongers have said that the IRS went too far [3] in pressing Tea Party groups for information when applying for federal non-profit tax status. Lost in this fine print is a critical fact. As Bloomberg.com reported [4], IRS staffers sent the same questionaire to Democratic groups suspected of not being charities but political as well. So it’s not just an "attack" on Republicans.
2. The real issue is the IRS isn’t doing its job.
On Wednesday, Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse gave a speech [5] in the Senate where he laid out the fictions used by political groups to masquarade as charities. He pointed out that industry groups—like PhRMA, the drug company lobby—file reports to IRS and Federal Election Commission filled with contradictory information about their political activities. “Making a material false statement to a federal agency is not just bad behavior, it’s a crime,” he said. But “the Department of Justice won’t prosecute false statements… unless the case has been referred by the IRS… [and] the IRS never makes a referral.”
“So it is very wrong that the IRS required additional information from a number of organizations based on a screen incorporating their Tea Party orientation,” Whitehouse said. “Picking on the little guy is a pretty lousy thing to do; rolling over for the powerful and letting them file false statements is pretty lousy too.”
3. Team Obama’s hysterical overreactions.
The adminstration’s reactions, from the president to Attorney General Eric Holder, have fed the hysteria and given the GOP a green light to turn the Tea Party into victims. Not only did the firing of the IRS acting director come prematurely, but Obama’s overreaction cements the notion that many local Tea Party groups—frequently funded [6] by the Koch brothers—were en led to be treated the same under tax law as the March of Dimes. Moreover, Holder’s statement that he was recusing himself while announcing the FBI investigation just picks another fight [7] between the administration and congressional Republicans. What Obama could have done was take the risk of explaining how the system really works—what’s broken—and the solutions, even though he has been a beneficiary of it.
4. Charities are not political front groups.
The question of who turned charities into political front groups has barely been discussed. The answer, of course, is the same as it always has been: election lawyers and campaign consultants who look for loopholes in the law so clients can run for office using any tactic with little or no accountability.
Media coverage of this scandal has had the wrong starting line. It wasn’t the IRS that deluged its staff with thousands [8] of applications from political groups pretending to be charities. It was groups following the advice or example of campaign consultants such as Karl Rove. He was the first to use this ruse on a large scale in order to run a shadow presidential campaign where he could hide his donors’ iden ies.
The way this works is simple. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling deregulated campaign finances, political operators looked for ambiguities [9] to exploit and turned to non-profit tax law—knowing the agency's primary focus has nothing to do with electioneering. One of the legal ambiguities is the fiction that "public education" and "lobbying" activities by non-profits groups are not political (and thus subject to election law) if they comprise more than 50 percent of that group’s activities.
So that’s what Karl Rove ginned up with his non-profit Crossroads GPS [10], which spent $123 million for the 2012 federal elections, according to the Sunlight Foundation, with 70 percent raised from secret donors. The IRS still has not issued a ruling on whether Rove’s group violated non-profit tax law.
5. The IRS’s top GOP critics were elected this way.
Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey might be the GOP frontman on federal gun controls, but on this issue he has compared [11] the IRS scrutiny to President Richard Nixon’s infamous enemies list. Of course, two political non-profits, Rove’s Crossroads GPS and the Republican Jewish Coalition spent $17.6 million on his behalf by the time Election Day rolled around last fall. He’s hardly the only member of Congress whose rise to power was helped by political front groups masquerading as tax-exempt charities.
One of the unwritten but enduring Washington rules is that both political parties will not tinker with the tactics that helped them gain power—because they mastered the system to get elected. But that is not even the biggest GOP hypocrisy surrounding this "scandal."
6. Lies are so big they hide in plain sight.
The party known for voter suppression and intimidation now feels targeted? The spectacle of Republicans protesting that its groups were targeted by the IRS, when the only business of some of these groups was to lead the GOP’s 2012 voter suppression efforts, is just unbelievable. The GOP has spent years trying to discourage and suppress voting blocks that it perceives will back Democrats, such as black and brown voters, and students. Its entire "voter fraud" canard is based on policing the polls in myriad ways targeting millions of voters.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...ty-irs-scandal
The IRS and the Real Scandal
“This systematic abuse cannot be fixed with just one resignation, or two,” said David Camp, the Republican chairman of the House tax-writing committee, at an oversight hearing Friday morning dealing with the IRS. “This is not a personnel problem. This is a problem of the IRS being too large, too intrusive, too abusive.”
David Camp has it wrong. There has been a “systematic” abuse of power, but it’s not what Camp has in mind. The real scandal is that:
The IRS has interpreted our tax laws to allow big corporations and wealthy individuals to make unlimited secret campaign donations through sham political fronts called “social welfare organizations,” like Karl Rove’s “Crossroads,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and “Priorites USA.”
This campaign money has been used to bribe Congress to keep in place tax loopholes like the “carried interest” rule that allows the managers of hedge funds and private equity funds to treat their income as capital gains, subject only to low capital gains taxes rather than ordinary income taxes, and other loopholes that allow CEOs to get special tax treatment on giant compensation packages that now average $10 million a year.
Despite a growing number of billionaires and multi-millionaires using every tax dodge imaginable – laundering their money through phantom corporations and tax havens — the IRS’s budget has been cut by 17 percent since 2002, adjusted for inflation. To manage the $594.5 million in additional cuts required by the sequester, the agency will furlough each of its more than 89,000 employees for at least five days this year.
Finally, all of this, coming at a time when the Supreme Court has deemed corporations “people” under the First Amendment and when income and wealth are more concentrated at the top than they’ve been in over a hundred years, has enabled America’s financial elite to further entrench their wealth and power and thereby take over much of American democracy.
This is the real scandal and the real abuse, Congressman Camp. Your indignation over the IRS’s alleged “targeting” of conservative groups is a distraction from the main event.
http://robertreich.org/post/50660147280
Shazbot, I stopped at the first point of the first of your last two links. Why should I read more, when what you post has no merit?
Yes, liberal agencies sometimes get denied that status too. It was the IRS's job to accept or deny applicants. The problem here was that keywords in the name were used, and then approval was delayed 2 years till after the 2012 elections, while approved liberal organizations only took about 90 days normally.
Go back and watch the two C-Span links I posted.
Read more: http://samuel-warde.com/2013/05/the-...court-scandal/Karl Rove is the real poster boy for the so-called IRS (Internal Revenue Service) “scandal” of taking a closer look at applications by political organizations seeking a 501(c)(4) tax status that makes them not only tax exempt but protects their donors with anonymity.
That 501(c )(4) is one sweet deal: not only do these organizations get untraceable, tax-free money laundering for their political activities, they gat a taxpayer subsidy to do it.
And it gets better: some of these activities used to be illegal and people working for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) – Nixon in 1972 – were convicted of law-breaking, as were some corporate donors. In October 2010 in the New York Times, Jill Abramson noted one illegal Nixon operation was run by “a group of Nixon loyalists, some of whom are leading this year’s non-profit push.”
Early in 2010, Karl Rove, who was with Nixon in 1972, founded American Crossroads, a perfectly legal, openly political, tax-exempt 527 organization, with no limits on the amount or source of their contributions, and no spending limits. Despite these freedoms, 527s were still prohibited from openly supporting particular candidates, and they had to register with the IRS, disclose donors, and file reports.
So?
I guess you don't believe in the fourth amendment, as it applies to personal action either. How one spends their own money is their business. Not yours.
Granted, not exactly covered by the fourth, but strikingly similar to me.
Karl Rove Equates His Dark-Money ‘Social Welfare’ PAC With The NAACP
http://www.nationalmemo.com/watch-ka...ith-the-naacp/
Repug REACHOUT to blacks continues full speed ahead!
Probably not. Of course, the IRS appears to have managed this as well as one would expect croutons to do.
The only question is what did the president know and when did he know it?
Damn lol
I watched the 3+ hr video from C-Span I linked in post 8. Congress proved this guy to be an incompetent, or covering for others in my view.
That snippet starts at 1:37:01 of the part 2 I linked.
Over half of the 5014c's vetteed werer NOT tea-bagger/non-patriot orgs.
the scandal is fabricated, bogus, 100% pure, bad-faith, anything-but-do-real-work, harassment, witch-hunting politics.
The IRS admitted they intentionally targeted conservative groups.
/thread
Of course, why not? Extreme right-wing SCOTUS C-U plus really law making opened the door.
An excellent policy, given the explosion of tax-evading, dark money groups, and IRS "targeted" more non-conservative groups than conservative.
/thread
Ever heard of George Soros, wad?
Of course, why not? Extreme right-wing SCOTUS C-U plus really law making opened the door.
An excellent policy, given the explosion of tax-evading, dark money groups, and IRS "targeted" more non-conservative groups than conservative.
/thread
sure, what about him, in the context of IRS vetting probably bogus 501c4 orgs?
Pot, Kettle. IRS just doesn't stall liberal 504's.
go fetch the list of 5014c's orgs that were questioned, less than half are right-wing assholes. btw, none of the right-wing orgs were denied tax exempt status.
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