AWKWARD! IRS must say if White House sought taxpayers’ information More and more decisions....

AWKWARD! IRS must say if White House sought taxpayers’ information More and more decisions...going against this corrupt administration.

A federal judge Friday ordered the IRS to turn over the records of any requests from the White House seeking taxpayers’ private information from the tax agency, delivering a victory to a group that for two years has been trying to pry the data loose.

It’s not clear that there were any such requests — but Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the IRS cannot just refuse to say so by citing taxpayer confidentiality laws, known as section 6103 of the tax code.

Read more:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/28/irs-must-say-if-wh-sought-taxpayers-info-judge/

The irs has gone to such great lengths to obstruct that I wouldn't be surprised at all if the wh were in on it.

We know that holder at minimum knew... that lerner had a private acct under her dogs name... that her computer and phone were destroyed... that the irs destroyed backup tapes of the emails despite congressional investigation and subpoena.

I can't think of any other reason to go to these elaborate measures except to obstruct justice. Standard obama procedure.

Fast n furious
Lies to force obamacaid passage
Media wiretapping and intimidation
Nsa director lied to congress about mass information gathering
Benghazi youtube diversion
Irs targeting
Iran deal misrepresentations

Lying and obfuscation are the new transparency.

Nada....three years after the promise of anything.....Nada....Next.

So you are happy with the administrations response to legal and constitutionally protected public inquiry?

You think they have been cooperative and transparent?



Lol... I was cracking up just typing those questions.

People are Drawing the Wrong Lesson from the IRS 501(c)(4) Scandal: We Need to Rethink the Whole Concept of Tax-Exempt Organizations

Author: Ed Dolan · May 20th, 2013


"President Obama is shocked and angered that the IRS targeted certain conservative organizations for special scrutiny when they applied for 501(c)(4) tax exemptions as “social welfare” organizations. Republicans are just as shocked. The whole Washington political establishment is shocked, just shocked, that anyone, let alone the IRS, would try to stem the flow of political money that pours through this gaping loophole in the federal tax system.

The campaign finance reform organization Democracy 21 has tirelessly documented abuse of the 504(c)(4) loophole by political organizations. Its president, Fred Wertheimer, is quick to agree that the IRS was wrong to single out Tea Party affiliated organizations for scrutiny. However, Wertheimer does not suggest that the IRS should evenhandedly rubber stamp all 501(c)(4) applications. Instead, he argues that it should aggressively clamp down on loophole abusers of the right, left, and center. His list of targets includes Carl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, the pro-Obama group Priorities USA, and Americans Elect, an organization that sought to run an independent candidate for president in 2012.

There seems to be an informal premise, supported by past practice of the IRS, that a self-proclaimed social welfare organization is abusing its tax status if it spends more than half of its budget on overtly political activities. As Wertheimer points out, the IRS does not enforce even this generous limit. Many 501(c)(4)s cross the 50 percent line with impunity, and some have even registered as political parties. However, as he recently told the Washington Post’s Dylan Mathews, the 50 percent limit, even if strictly enforced, is already too generous. According to the relevant statute, it should be zero.
Although I applaud Wertheimer’s efforts to get the IRS to obey the law, I think his focus is far too narrow. The 501(c)(4) “social welfare” designation is only one of many tax exemptions that needs a rethink. The IRS code includes more than two dozen types of 501(c) organizations, ranging from credit unions to insurance companies, that qualify for various kinds of tax privileges.

The 501(c)(4) social welfare groups that are at the center of the current IRS scandal are sometimes lumped together with their close cousins, 501(c)(3) charitable organizations. They share some tax privileges such as not having to pay tax on income they earn and exemption from gift taxes. In other ways they differ. The big draw of 501(c)(3) status is the right of donors to deduct contributions from their federal income taxes. The main attraction of 501(c)(4) groups, instead, seems to be their right not to reveal the identity of their donors. For some donors, anonymity is apparently even more valuable than a tax deduction...

[...]




The bottom line: The scandal over the apparent political bias in the IRS treatment of 501(c)(4) groups is nothing compared to the broader scandal of a tax system that is corrupt and inefficient at every turn. We need to attack the code with an axe. In doing so, we should not to flinch at chopping off the 501(c)s with all their rotten branches." - See more at:

http://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2013/05/20/people-are-drawing-the-wrong-lesson-from-the-irs-501c4-scandal-we-need-to-rethink-the-whole-concept-of-tax-exempt-organizations-2/#sthash.FpTcZhfb.dpuf

The IRS did not "target" conservative groups. There were simply more of them. When the IRS was planning to audit Karl Rove's activity, something had to be done...that was when Darrell Issa and a Bush holdover in Treasury decided to 1) ask the IRS specifically to investigate "tea party" groups, and 2) create a scandal out of the specific actions they had themselves requested.

It's comical that leftists can continue their willful ignorance when an ig, the dept head, and even lerner said differently.

Celia Roady, a prominent tax lawyer in the firm of Morgan Lewis, said she was called personally by Lois Lerner, the IRS head of the tax exempt division, on May 9.

"I received a call from Lois Lerner, who told me that she wanted to address an issue after her prepared remarks at the [American Bar Association] Tax Section's Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting, and asked if I would pose a question to her after her remarks," Roady said in a statement to U.S. News and World Report. "I agreed to do so, and she then gave me the question that I asked at the meeting the next day. We had no discussion thereafter on the topic of the question, nor had we spoken about any of this before I received her call. She did not tell me, and I did not know, how she would answer the question."

Acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller admitted to House lawmakers Friday during an oversight hearing of the controversy that the question was a plant. The IRS was aware of a forthcoming Treasury Department Inspector General Report that would condemn the targeting of groups applying for 501(c)(4) status if they contained the words "tea party," "patriot" or "9/12."

The transcript: http://electionlawblog.org/?p=50160

" However, in these cases, the way they did the centralization was not so fine. Instead of referring to  cases as advocacy cases, they actually used case names on this list. They used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate — that’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review. We don’t select for review because they have a particular name. The other thing that happened was they also, in some cases, cases sat around for a while. They also sent some letters out that were far too broad, asking questions of these organizations that weren’t really necessary for the type of application. In some cases you probably read that they asked for contributor names. That’s not appropriate, not usual, there are some very limited times when we might need that but in most of these cases where they were asked they didn’t do it correctly and they didn’t do it with a higher level of review. As I said, some of them sat around for too long."

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/27/irs_scandal_is_republicans_zombie/

THURSDAY, JUN 27, 2013 05:00 PM CDT

IRS scandal is Republicans’ zombie

Using a letter from the Treasury Inspector General, the GOP revives the scandal for another day -- but barely
ALEX SEITZ-WALD

"...During the time in question, May 2010 through May 2012, the IRS was flooded with applications for new conservative groups, thanks to the explosion of the Tea Party movement and the Citizens United decision. So it made some sense for the IRS screeners looking for political groups to start with them. If Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was, then IRS screeners went after Tea Party groups because that’s where the new applications were.

And thank to the IG’s letter today, we now have hard numbers to show just how big that flood was. Six groups with “progressive” in their name were added to a list of applications to be given extra scrutiny, while another 14 “progressive” tax-exempt applications filed during the time period in question were not added to the list. That makes for a grand total of 20 “progressive” groups. Meanwhile, there were 96 groups with “Tea Party,” “9/12″ or “Patriots” in their name.

And the IG’s letter says that “progressive” was placed on a “historical” list of terms to “be on the lookout” for — perhaps from a time when progressives were the ones flooding IRS offices with new applications.

Calling the targeting abusive is also fallacious, since, as Joan Walsh wrote, many of these groups were pretty blatantly political. And we still don’t have information on “Occupy” groups, which were also on the list and are perhaps a more accurate analog to “Tea Party” than “progressive.”..."

************

More than 2 years ago, but the GOP won't let the "scandal" die.

Lol... even when independent investigators say it... commissioners admit it... lerner plants a press question to get it out ahead of the ig report... then she uses the fifth to avoid incriminating herself and other... they still can't see it.

Nice salon link btw... lol.

NOTHING.....NADA.....STILL WAITING.

I wonder why we're waiting. It must be republican obstruction? It couldn't be the most transparent administration ever.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/former-irs-officials-email-lost-when-backup-tapes-routinely-erased-1435234390

WASHINGTON—Thousands of missing emails from former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner,a focus of lawmakers’ probes into alleged targeting of tea-party groups,were lost when backup digital tapes were erased last year,the agency’s inspector general has found.

The emails were first lost when the hard drive of Ms. Lerner’s computer crashed in mid-2011,when she was the head of the IRS’s tax-exempt division. Investigators had hoped to find the missing emails in backup tapes.

Now it turns out that 422 backup tapes from the crucial 2010-2011 period routinely were erased by IRS workers. The tapes were destroyed in March 2014,according to the Treasury inspector general for the IRS,J. Russell George. That is long after lawmakers started trying to obtain all of Ms. Lerner’s emails,and after the IRS issued instructions for employees to stop routine destruction of documents that might relate to the probes.

The finding means that much of the mystery surrounding alleged IRS targeting of tea party groups likely will continue. It could also raise difficult new questions for IRS managers,including Commissioner John Koskinen. Ms. Lerner has denied any wrongdoing.

“There was a [document] preservation order in place” that the IRS “never complied with,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R.,Utah),chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee,said during a Thursday hearing. “They destroyed evidence. That’s what they did.”