Tag Archives: Internal Revenue Service

May 19, 2013 · 6:22 PM

The Week in Wingnuts

Wingnuts

The Daily Beast

Legalized abortion causes school shootings, Obamacare will lead to conservatives being denied health services, and other wacky assertions from our political leaders.

North Dakota: Legalized Abortions Cause School Shootings

U.S. Representative Kevin Cramer knows the answer to why there have been so many school shootings in the U.S. over the past few years, and it’s not easy access to guns or inadequate treatment of the mentally ill. No, the Republican from North Dakota insists, the rise in school shootings is directly connected to the legalization of abortion and a supposed decline in Christian values. “We learned this week that the Pentagon is vetting its guide on religious tolerance with a group that compared Christian evangelism to rape, and advocated that military personnel and colluding chaplains who proselytize should be court martialed,” Cramer said during a commencement speech at the Catholic University of Mary that, miraculously, went unnoticed by the national media until this week. “Forty years ago, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned abortion on demand. And we wonder why our culture sees school shootings so often.” Cramer’s link between “normalized perversion” and mass murders rings eerily similar to Michele Bachmann’s argument that the September 11 terror attacks in 2001 and 2012 were God’s way of passing judgement (sic) on our country’s moral demise.

Missouri: The Gays Killed the Bullying Bill

Missouri’s Republican Representative Sue Allen has called on her constituents to contact openly gay lawmakers Jolie Justice and Mike Colona and blame them for the death of her anti-bullying bill. The key difference between Allen’s bill and other, more successful anti-bullying legislation is that it bans enumerated lists of specific groups of people that need protection–such as gay and transgender students–because she believes they are too partisan. “I typically try to keep partisanship out of my message, but this is an issue for the Democrats who wish for certain students (LGBT-gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) to be ‘enumerated’ within school policies…What they [Justus and Colona] don’t seem to understand is that stronger policies help ALL students, even those they would have characterized.” The problem with Allen’s argument is that enumerating specific groups does not, as she suggests, negate protection for anyone else, it simply ensures that any bullying of people who identify with these particularly at-risk groups is reported.

Kansas: Let’s Rise Above the N-Word

Kansas State Board of Education member Steve Roberts stood his ground Tuesdayin the face of offended fellow board members, defending his use of the N-word during last month’s meeting “100 percent.” In response to a comment from Topeka’s former NAACP president about the need for more African-American history in schools, Roberts launched into his own monologue about pushing “the frontiers of political correctness” with regards to the N-word–using it in full. When the board reconvened this week, Roberts was confronted about his use of the word, and how it offended people in the room, but he was remorseless. “I did my best to say the ‘N-word’ clinically. I’m willing to be considered politically incorrect, I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” Roberts said, suggesting that his critics were simply seeking media attention.

MInnesota: What’s Next, Political Bias for Health Care?

Michele Bachmann wouldn’t say she was happy to find out that the IRS had, in fact, been targeting conservative groups seeking nonprofit status, but the revelation did bring her some satisfaction. The Representative from Minnesota jumped at the chance to use the IRS scandal as evidence that the overreaching of big government has gotten out of control, suggesting that if non-profit organizations were targeted for their political beliefs, who’s to say they same system of discrimination won’t be used for other programs, such as health care. “Knowing it’s the IRS who will be the enforcing mechanism for this new entitlement program of Obamacare, it is very important to ask–and now it is reasonable to ask–could there be potential political implications of access to health care, denial of health care? Will that happen based on a person’s political beliefs or their religiously held beliefs?” Bachmann asked at a Capitol Hill rally on Thursday. “Those questions would have been considered out of bounds a week ago. Today those questions are considered more than reasonable, and more than fair for the American people.”

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May 18, 2013 · 2:49 PM

Nate Silver Debunks Peggy Noonan’s Claim IRS Also Went After Individuals Opposing Obama

Mediaite

2012 electoral polling star, the New York Times’s Nate Silver, who was lauded for being right on all things 2012 election, is back crunching the numbers, this time on the IRS political targeting scandal, specifically firing back at WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan’s claim that the Obama IRS went after wealthy Republican individuals in addition to Tea Party groups in his FiveThirtyEight blog Friday.

Noonan had wrote, “The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration,” espousing the IRS scandal as the “worst Washington scandal since Watergate.” She went on to point out specific wealthy individuals in Idaho and Georgia that had never been audited until going against President Obama.

After conceding that some conservative Romney supporters were targeted, Silver explains those high income earners supporting President Obama were also targeted based on simple math. Silver displays a chart that estimates the amount of high-income earners that were audited in 2012 by way of the IRS’s Data Book. He estimates the share of the vote that went to Romney versus Obama in each income bracket based on exit polling.

His results seem to debunk Ms. Noonan’s argument that only wealthy conservative individuals supporting Mitt Romney yielded an IRS audit, with an estimated 380,000 Romney voters being audited compared to 480,00 Obama voters.

Silver makes the larger point that even without intentional political targeting, hundreds of thousands of conservative voted would have beens selected for audits as part of their normal process. He goes on to suggest Noonan cherry picked few examples in a pool of thousands:

The fact that Ms. Noonan has identified four conservatives from that group of thousands provides no evidence at all toward her hypothesis. Nor would it tell us very much if dozens or even hundreds of conservative activists disclosed that they had been audited. This is exactly what you would expect in a country where there are 1.5 million audits every year.

He concludes that a handful of “anecdotal” data points aren’t worth much in a country of over 300 million people.

h/t FiveThirtyEight

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· 9:51 AM

Glenn Beck: NAACP Is A ‘Joke’, White People Were Lynched And Other Topics Of His Latest Rant

Let’s be clear here, Glenn Beck wants to replace his  former Fox News colleagues as the most outrageous commentator in the media.  His brand of manufactured outrage sells and believe me he’s selling and his audience is buying: his books, lectures, rallies and so on.   Having said that, what blows my mind is that millions of people listen to this clown and believes every word he utters.  To that, I say: Yikes!

The Huffington Post

Although President Obama condemned the Internal Revenue Service for singling out conservative groups in the months leading up to the 2012 election, former NAACP Chairman Julian Bond called the organization’s actions “completely legitimate.” And it was that sentiment that set conservative radio host Glenn Beck off, calling the entire organization a “joke” and an “affront” to what former black civil rights leaders stood for.

“They are a joke, and an affront to everything that Martin Luther King and anybody who ever… Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, you are an affront to their memory,” Beck said.

While discussing the IRS scandal, Beck hurled insults at the Obama administration and the NAACP, saying the White House was concentrating on revenge and that the century-old African-American organization was illegitimate.

Beck went on to try to drive his point home with an even stranger defense, asserting that 20 percent of lynchings performed by the Ku Klux Klan were of white people–a point he apparently “hates to keep bringing up.” He then went on to compare those white people who were lynched to members of the Tea Party.

“You know what, I contend the white people that were lynched are exactly the kind of people that would be in the Tea Party today,” he said.

Beck’s sentiments have us scratching our heads a bit, but then again what else is new? From calling the president a girl, to saying African American is not a race we can’t say we’re all that surprised by his latest rant.

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May 17, 2013 · 12:15 PM

5 Major Scandals The Media Isn’t Obsessing About

If it looks like Obama might have caused the scandal, then it’s NEWS…if not, it falls by the wayside.

Think Progress

This week, the national media has focused on the three different scandals surrounding the White House, devoting hours of coverage to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) improperly targeting conservative groups applying for tax exempt status, the talking points Susan Rice used in the aftermath of the attacks in Benghazi, and the Justice Department’s subpoena of phone records from the Associated Press as part of an investigation into a national security leak. The around-the-clock coverage comes even as a new Gallup poll finds that interest in the ongoing controversies is “lower comparable to major news stores in the past.”

And while these stories raise serious concerns about money in politics, embassy security, and freedom of the press, they aren’t the only problems impacting the American people. Here are five big stories the media isn’t obsessing about:

1. Carbon pollution reaches historic highs, threatening human existence. The concentration of climate warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “has passed the milestone level of 400 parts per million (ppm),” scientists estimate. “At the beginning of industrialisation the concentration of CO2 was just 280ppm,” said Prof Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “We must hope that the world crossing this milestone will bring about awareness of the scientific reality of climate change and how human society should deal with the challenge.” The last time the Earth saw carbon dioxide levels that high, humans did not exist. The West Antarctic ice sheet also did not exist, and sea levels were as much as 82 feet higher than they are today. During an earlier period when CO2 levels were this high, temperatures were 5° to 10°F warmer globally.

2. The devastating impact of sequestration on kids, cancer patients and first responders. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the budget deficit will shrink to its smallest level since before the Great Recession in 2013, and it will continue to decrease through 2015. But despite the smaller deficits, Republicans remain focused on spending reductions — even as the most recent round of cuts has kicked children out of preschool, left cancer patients without needed screenings, undermined public health and fire safety, and gutted programs that help low-income Americans in a variety of ways. Those cuts have also threatened to derail the economic recovery, which has sputtered along despite the headwinds created by a consistent focus on deficit reduction.

3. Massive cuts to food stamps for the most vulnerable Americans. The House Agriculture Committee approved a farm bill late Wednesday night that would cut federal food stamps by $20.5 billion — more steeply than any legislation since the welfare reforms of the 1990s. Earlier this week, the Senate Agriculture Committee also agreed to a $4.1 billion reduction. The program keeps hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Americans out of the deepest pits of poverty, and even as the Great Recession swelled SNAP rolls, the program continued to push its erroneous payments rates to record lows.

4. 1100 workers die in garment factory collapse in Bangladesh and most American retailers plan business as usual. Since a factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing 1,100 clothing industry workers, American retailers have been hesitant to adopt safety plans that could prevent similar tragedies. Abercrombie & Fitch announced it would sign a safety upgrade plan that has been approved by six major European retailers and one other American company, but many other manufacturers — including Walmart and Gap — are holding out. Although some retailers fear the costs of upgrades, they could pass them on entirely to consumers and only raise prices by 10 cents per garment.

5. 4,000 gun deaths due to gun violence since Newtown. A crowdsourced effort to count every person killed by a gun in the United States since the Newtown tragedy is currently being hosted by Slate. As of this writing, the count is 4,150. The Senate rejected gun safety legislation in April and has not yet set a date for reconsidering the measure.

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· 8:30 AM

Rachel Maddow Reveals More Scandalous Details About IRS Tea Party Targeting

Mediaite

Rachel Maddow tonight highlighted another potential problem in the growing IRS targeting scandal plaguing the Obama administration this week. The tax-collecting agency provided private tax information about several conservative groups, including ones whose applications had not been fully processed yet, to the website ProPublica. Maddow said that strictly speaking, this was illegal, and will only make things worse for the IRS.

Maddow claimed that the Tea Party now suddenly “wants to be back on the wings of the IRS scandal,” and said that things are awkward politically because essentially everyone else agrees with them on this scandal. She acknowledged the “improper scrutiny” being given to conservatives groups that seemingly eluded their liberal counterparts.

Maddow highlighted how the same IRS Cincinnati office involved in the targeting scandal released documents to ProPublica for the site’s series of posts on groups misleading the IRS about their political activities. Documents were provided for a number of conservative groups, even from nine that were not approved yet by the IRS, which is technically illegal because “it’s supposed to be secret” if an application has not been approved.

When ProPublica attempted to find out why exactly they were given the documents, Maddow said the IRS’s response was basically “We shouldn’t have done that!” She admitted that the agency “screwed up here” and could end up making its level of scrutiny worse after this week.

Watch the video below, courtesy of MSNBC:

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· 8:13 AM

Friday Blog Roundup – 5-17-2013

‘It’s. The. Law.’

Many Not Following Scandal Coverage

‘Star Trek’s’ Most Memorable Moments

House votes to repeal Obamacare for 37th time

Congressional Hearings on I.R.S. Scandal to Start

Obama To Give Jobs Speech In Baltimore At 1:20 P.M. ET

N.Y. attorney general investigating fast food industry wage theft

Gallup: Republicans Far More Interested In IRS Scandal, Benghazi

Cause of Texas plant blast still uncertain, criminality is possibility

On MSNBC’s All In , Eric Boehlert Exposes The Talking Points Sideshow

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May 16, 2013 · 3:24 PM

Former NAACP Chair Says The IRS Was Right To Target Tea Party Groups (VIDEO)

Julian Bond; photo: Nikki Khan, The Washington Post;@PBS

I absolutely agree with former NAACP Chair, Julian Bond.  This entire faux outrage fiasco is designed to make the president look bad.  That has been the objective of the GOP since Tuesday, January 20th, 2009.

Addicting Info

As my colleague Egberto Willies wrote on Tuesday, this whole tempest in a teacup over the IRS scrutiny of groups who used “tea party” or “patriot” in their names is foolish. He is correct in stating that the IRS was well within its boundaries and, indeed, was doing exactly what it should have been doing. The granting of a 501(c) status is a very big deal. When I was on the staff of the one of the largest Pagan churches in the country, it took us years to be approved for that tax-free status. The IRS doesn’t hand those exemptions out like candy: you must prove that you fit the qualifications. Most of the Tea Party groups most certainly did not, not if they were engaged in politics.

We are not the only ones who think that the IRS was doing its job, either. Former NAACP Chairman, Julian Bond, told Thomas Roberts of MSNBC:

 

“I think it’s entirely legitimate to look at the tea party. Here are a group of people who are admittedly racist, who are overtly political, who’ve tried as best they can to harm President Obama in every way they can.”

Mr. Bond found himself in a similar situation back in 2004 when, after a speech he’d given criticizing then-President George Bush, he received a letter from the IRS advising him that the NAACP was being investigated because of what he said. He thought that he was exercising his right to free speech but, as some of us know, criticism of Bush was not covered by that right.

But criticism of Obama? Well, that’s an entirely different matter. We’ve seen it time and again: Tea Party “patriots” with outrageous signs saying horrible things about a duly elected president. And these are most definitely not non-political groups. As Mr. Bond noted:

“They are the Taliban wing of American politics. We all ought to be a little worried about them.”

When Roberts asked Bond if that wasn’t a bit harsh – calling the TP the “Taliban wing” of American politics – Bond replied that it wasn’t at all too harsh and that we should all be concerned about their influence. He did say that it was wrong of the IRS to be so heavy-handed and chided them for not explaining their actions better. But Bond was adamant that this situation has no parallel to the targeting of the NAACP in 2004.

Now a liberal group called Progress Texas has come forward saying that they received the same level of scrutiny that the Tea Party groups did. Their executive director, Ed Espinoza, said in a statement:

“Progress Texas and the Tea Party strongly disagree on the role of government. Yet, when we applied for tax-exempt status, Progress Texas received the same type of additional scrutiny that Tea Party groups are complaining about. The similar treatment indicates the IRS was likely addressing a flood of 501(c)4 applications after Citizens United, and undermines the paranoid notion that Tea Party groups were singled out.”

Exactly. This entire “scandal” is being blown up out of all proportion. The IRS, the agency that collects the taxes for the American people to run our government, should be wary of groups that apply for 501(c) status. Even more so when the applicants have been so brazen about its involvement in politics. This faux outrage is silly. The IRS was just doing its job and the Tea Party groups are doing what they do: blame the government and whine about taxes. Same as it ever was.

Here’s the video of Bond’s appearance:

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· 8:21 AM

In Two Hours Obama Destroys the GOP’s Benghazi and IRS Scandals

obama-irs

So, there you have it…

PoliticusUSA

Just as Republicans and their media lackeys were getting their Obama scandal machine fired up, President Obama killed both the Benghazi and IRS “scandals” in a couple of hours.

The president put a stake through the heart of the GOP’s attempts to revive Benghazi by releasing 100 pages of emails. (Now, the world can see how badly Jon Karl and ABC News got played when they used the summaries of someone else’s notes.) The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent published an email from Tommy Vietor, who until recently was the spokesperson for the National Security Council. Vietor wrote, “Regarding the talking points, it’s not surprising that the entire government would want the chance to look at and edit that language. This was a dynamic situation and new information was constantly flowing in, and different agencies had important concerns that had to be addressed – the State Department had security concerns, the FBI was worried about its investigation, and the CIA had a major, yet still undisclosed, role.”

Republicans are putting out vague statements about contradictions, but Benghazi is pretty much finished as a scandal. It is difficult to accuse the White House of a cover up, when they’ve released all the emails.

The second part of the one-two punch was Obama speaking about the IRS scandal.

Video:

Transcript

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May 15, 2013 · 8:51 AM

When the IRS targeted liberals

When the IRS targeted liberals

Thanks to Jueseppi B. for bringing this to my attention.

So, my question to the “outraged” Tea Party, GOP and most Republicans in general:

Where was your outrage in 2006 when the Bush administration targeted dissenters of his administration?

Salon

Under George W. Bush, it went after the NAACP, Greenpeace and even a liberal church

While few are defending the Internal Revenue Service for targeting some 300 conservative groups, there are two critical pieces of context missing from the conventional wisdom on the “scandal.” First, at least from what we know so far, the groups were not targeted in a political vendetta — but rather were executing a makeshift enforcement test (an ugly one, mind you) for IRS employees tasked with separating political groups not allowed to claim tax-exempt status, from bona fide social welfare organizations. Employees are given almost zero official guidance on how to do that, so they went after Tea Party groups because those seemed like they might be political. Keep in mind, the commissioner of the IRS at the time was a Bush appointee.

The second is that while this is the first time this kind of thing has become a national scandal, it’s not the first time such activity has occurred.

“I wish there was more GOP interest when I raised the same issue during the Bush administration, where they audited a progressive church in my district in what look liked a very selective way,” California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said on MSNBC Monday. “I found only one Republican, [North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones], that would join me in calling for an investigation during the Bush administration. I’m glad now that the GOP has found interest in this issue and it ought to be a bipartisan concern.”

The well-known church, All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena, became a bit of a cause célèbre on the left after the IRS threatened to revoke the church’s tax-exempt status over an anti-Iraq War sermon the Sunday before the 2004 election. “Jesus [would say], ‘Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine,’” rector George Regas said from the dais.

The church, which said progressive activism was in its “DNA,” hired a powerful Washington lawyer and enlisted the help of Schiff, who met with the commissioner of the IRS twice and called for a Government Accountability Office investigation, saying the IRS audit violated the First Amendment and was unduly targeting a political opponent of the Bush administration. “My client is very concerned that the close coordination undertaken by the IRS allowed partisan political concerns to direct the course of the All Saints examination,” church attorney Marcus Owens, who is widely considered one of the country’s leading experts on this area of the law, said at the time. In 2007, the IRS closed the case, decreeing that the church violated rules preventing political intervention, but it did not revoke its nonprofit status.

And while All Saints came under the gun, conservative churches across the country were helping to mobilize voters for Bush with little oversight. In 2006, citing the precedent of All Saints, “a group of religious leaders accused the Internal Revenue Service yesterday of playing politics by ignoring its complaint that two large churches in Ohio are engaging in what it says are political activities, in violation of the tax code,” the New York Times reported at the time. The churches essentially campaigned for a Republican gubernatorial candidate, they alleged, and even flew him on one of their planes.

Meanwhile, Citizens for Ethics in Washington filed two ethics complaints against a church in Minnesota. “You know we can’t publicly endorse as a church and would not for any candidate, but I can tell you personally that I’m going to vote for Michele Bachmann,” pastor Mac Hammond of the Living Word Christian Center in Minnesota said in 2006 before welcoming her to the church. The IRS opened an audit into the church, but it went nowhere after the church appealed the audit on a technicality.

And it wasn’t just churches. In 2004, the IRS went after the NAACP, auditing the nation’s oldest civil rights group after its chairman criticized President Bush for being the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to address the organization. “They are saying if you criticize the president we are going to take your tax exemption away from you,” then-chairman Julian Bond said. “It’s pretty obvious that the complainant was someone who doesn’t believe George Bush should be criticized, and it’s obvious of their response that the IRS believes this, too.”

In a letter to the IRS, Democratic Reps. Charles Rangel, Pete Stark and John Conyers wrote: “It is obvious that the timing of this IRS examination is nothing more than an effort to intimidate the members of the NAACP, and the communities the organization represents, in their get-out-the-vote effort nationwide.”

Then, in 2006, the Wall Street Journal broke the story of a how a little-known pressure group called Public Interest Watch — which received 97 percent of its funds from Exxon Mobile one year — managed to get the IRS to open an investigation into Greenpeace. Greenpeace had labeled Exxon Mobil the “No. 1 climate criminal.” The IRS acknowledged its audit was initiated by Public Interest Watch and threatened to revoke Greenpeace’s tax-exempt status, but closed the investigation three months later.

As the Journal reporter, Steve Stecklow, later said in an interview, “This comes against a backdrop where a number of conservative groups have been attacking nonprofits and NGOs over their tax-exempt status. There have been hearings on Capitol Hill. There have been a number of conservative groups in Washington who have been quite critical.”

Indeed, the year before that, the Senate held a hearing on nonprofits’ political activity. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, the then-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the IRS needed better enforcement, but also “legislative changes” to better define the lines between politics and social welfare, since they had not been updated in “a generation.” Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the IRS has defined 501(c)4′s sufficiently to this day, leaving the door open for IRS auditors to make up their own, discriminatory rules.

Those cases mostly involved 501(c)3 organizations, which live in a different section of the tax code for real charities like hospitals and schools. The rules are much stronger and better developed for (c)3′s, in part because they’ve been around longer. But with “social welfare” (c)4 groups, the kind of political activity we saw in 2010 and 2012 is so unprecedented that you get cases like Emerge America, a progressive nonprofit that trains Democratic female candidates for public office. The group has chapters across the country, but in 2011, chapters in Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada were denied 501(c)4 tax-exempt status. Leaders called the situation “bizarre” because in the five years Nevada had waited for approval, the Kentucky chapter was approved, only for the other three to be denied.

A former IRS official told the New York Times that probably meant the applications were sent to different offices, which use slightly different standards. Different offices within the same organization that are supposed to impose the exact same rules in a consistent manner have such uneven conceptions of where to draw the line at a political group, that they can approve one organization and then deny its twin in a different state.

All of these stories suggest that while concern with the IRS posture toward conservative groups now may be merited, to fully understand the situation requires a bit of context and history.

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· 8:10 AM

4 key findings from the Inspector General’s report on the IRS scandal

An internal report says the White House had no hand in the IRS scandal.

This has been a heck of a week for the Obama Administration.

The  GOP has several gripes with Obama over Benghazi details. Then there’s the Tea Party who feel victimized for being flagged by the IRS (they blame Obama of course.)  Finally, the newest scandal over  someone ordering  specific reporters from Associated Press targeted to have their phones tapped over national security leaks.

The following report details with the IRS scandal…

The Week

The agency used “inappropriate criteria” to flag Tea Party groups for scrutiny

The Obama administration this week has been beset by a spate of scandals, one of which was the revelation that the IRS targeted conservative political groups that applied for tax-exempt status. Now, a much-anticipated internal report has found that the agency erred in singling out those groups over an 18-month period starting in 2010. The report, conducted by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and delivered to Congress on Tuesday, offered new insight into the developing scandal.

In response, President Obama said in a statement that he had instructed Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew “to hold those responsible for these failures accountable, and to make sure that each of the Inspector General’s recommendations are implemented quickly, so that such conduct never happens again.”

Here, four key findings:

1. Staffers developed “inappropriate criteria” to flag applications
According to the report, the IRS office in Cincinnati that processes all applications for tax-exempt status deliberately targeted Tea Party groups for further review — though the report did not go so far as to say that the targeting was politically motivated. While the IRS admitted as much last week, and even offered a mea culpa for the practice, the report is the first independent verification of its existence.

“The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of potential political campaign intervention,” the report states.

The IG report reviewed 296 applications as of last December, of which 108 had been approved, while another 160 had been left pending. About one-third of the applications flagged for further review contained “tea party,” “patriots,” or “9/12″ in their names, the report found.

2. BOLO: “Be on the lookout”
According to the report, the Determinations Unit within the IRS in May 2010 began developing criteria for singling out applications with “Tea Party,” “Patriots,”  ”9/12,” or other “political sounding” names for added scrutiny. The unit then drafted a spreadsheet of groups flagged under this criteria, which came to be known as the “Be on the Lookout” list, or BOLO.

The department distributed the first BOLO list in August 2010, but the criteria for flagging an organization in the spreadsheet quickly broadened. By mid-2011, the criteria had expanded to include groups focused on “government spending, government debt, or taxes,” as well as groups critical of how the government was being run, and those that sought to educate the public about how to “make America a better place to live.”

The IRS insisted that the guidelines were “shorthand” that could be used to flag all overtly political groups — not only Tea Party ones — that were trying to receive tax-exempt status as “social welfare” organizations. Yet the IG report disagreed with that assessment.

“Whether the inappropriate criterion was shorthand for all potential political cases or not, developing and using criteria that focuses on organization names and policy positions instead of the activities permitted under the Treasury Regulations does not promote public confidence that tax-exempt laws are being adhered to impartially,” the report states.

3. The review process led to “substantial delays”
The increased scrutiny resulted in “substantial delays” for flagged applications, with some left pending for up to 1,138 days. According to the report, some applications sat open through the last two election cycles due to “ineffective management oversight” that left unclear how specialists should process applications.

The report says that agency management “did not ensure that there was a formal process in place for initiating, tracking, or monitoring requests for assistance,” and that guidelines for processing pending applications often changed, leaving lower-level staffers unsure how to proceed. In the most egregious instance, the Determinations Unit stopped working on applications entirely for a 13-month period while awaiting further guidance.

“Although the processing of some applications with potential significant political campaign intervention was started soon after receipt, no work was completed on the majority of these applications for 13 months,” the report said.

Some 170 groups received requests for additional information from the IRS. According to the report, 98 of those requests, or nearly 60 percent, were later found to be unnecessary. Those requests sought a range of information, including the names of donors, the size of their donations, and details on how those contributions were used. Other requests asked about organizations’ political affiliation and outside activities.

4. Some political cover for the White House
Republicans have demanded to know whether anyone in the Obama administration had a hand in ordering the extended reviews. Yet the report appears to have cleared government higher-ups, determining that the program was limited to “first-line management” within the agency, and that it was not “influenced by any individual outside of the IRS.”

Instead, the report pins much of the blame on the agency’s management structure, saying that “insufficient oversight provided by management” allowed the program to go on as long as it did.

According to the report, agency executives immediately demanded that the criteria for flagging applications be changed when it came to their attention in June 2011. The requested changes rolled back the program’s focus to cover activity simply deemed to be “political, lobbying, or [general] advocacy,” with no mention of political affiliation. However, agency specialists charged with flagging applications changed the language back six months later, in January 2012, with no approval from IRS executives because they thought the new guidelines were too vague. Those criteria would stay in place until May, when executives once again ordered that they be changed.

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