Posted on 05/23/2013 9:55:52 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Coburn: Constituents link IRS audits to Mitt Romney donations By Daniel Strauss - 05/23/13 09:33 AM ET
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said Thursday his constituents have suggested they were audited by the Internal Revenue Service because they donated to Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.
Coburn made the charge during an interview on MSNBC. [Watch video]
"What I would tell you, is our whistleblower side is lit up," Coburn said Thursday on the news channel. "And I got a phone call yesterday and one of the things I want to know is, everybody that contributed to Romney, I want to know what their audit rate was because the indications out of Oklahoma are right now is if you happened to be a conservative and wealthy and gave to Romney, you had an audit where you'd never gotten an audit before.
"And so there are a lot of questions that still have to be answered," Coburn said. "Maybe that's untrue but that's certainly the implication from people that are calling me from Oklahoma."
Coburn's comments come as Congress is investigating the IRS's targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status for additional scrutiny. The IRS has apologized for inappropriately flagging groups for additional scrutiny because they had certain words in their titles, such as Tea Party.
There's been no evidence the IRS targeted people for audits based on their political donations, though some donors to Romney have drawn a link.
Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) in a floor speech last week also said that a number of his constituents spoke of being audited during the 2012 presidential campaign for the first time.
“These folks believe the audits were conducted for no other reason than the fact that their groups were conservative. And they believe the questions they’ve been asked have more to do with their political views than their business activities," McConnell said.
Without a proper investigation, McConnell argued the truth would never be known.
Earlier in the week, Rep. Patrick Tiberi (R-Ohio) said that people have come to him saying the IRS targeted them for criticizing the Obama administration. Tiberi recounted how a former colleague told him about a radio host who received an audit from the IRS after he criticized the Obama administration.
"And this is not a national guy, this is a local talk show host in a city outside Ohio, and he's been very critical of the administration and as soon as he started being critical of the administration, coincidentally, he got audited and he got audited by the Cincinnati office,'" Tiberi said.
Kinda surprised Megyn hasn’t mentioned this yet.
I want to see LARGE NUMBERS of IRS employees and Obama Regime officials heading to jail. I strongly suspect that “Tax Agents” will be as popular in prison as child molesters are.
Get used to disappointment
What you are wishing for could only happen in a country ruled by laws. That country is dead. The GOP will help sweep this under the rug....even though they were targeted by this. Why? I just don't know.
I weep for my country.
Actually - if you correlate donation amounts between Romney and Obama donors, with a secondary income band correlation, you would (in my opinion) see a five hundred to a thousand percent difference in audit risk. The numbers are pure guess work - but I’m confident they’re in the ball park.
This seems too hot to cover already. The items FNC deems worthy of a BREAKING ALERT is strange... if you’re covering the IRS live, as Megyn is, can’t you slip Coburn’s story in?
I guess everybody’s on the phone with him right now.
THANK YOU!
This is EXACTLY the kind of abuse of power by the executive branch that the founders sought to prevent.
Most people are only audited once. Audits are happening all the time. Automatic audits from matching income are increasing in frequency because the IRS is matching more data every year.
Congress should ask for the IRS’s internet records and see who all was going to donation sites like opensecrets.org (which should be blocked from gov’t computers imo)
Even Coburn seems to want to stop short of saying that the singling out of Romney donors is a fact, but it does make everyone wonder.
Indeed the big story here is that the IRS is fast losing any credibility for being impartial. Most people have had some apprehension about the IRS, and most probably inherently dislike it (no one likes to pay taxes), but this will spread fear and complete distrust.
But will it spread a real tax revolt? How do you like your TEA...one lump or two?
I think we should go print out some of those “Tax Closure” notioces that they love to plaster on the front doors of businesses when they close them down....
We should print them out and then go to our local IRS offices and tape them to their windows and doors as a protest.....
But they would send in DHS and probabaly have us all hauled away....
“tax revolt?” Maybe, but I think this is going to not only reinvigorate the Tea Party movement, it will bring some others into more active criticism of tax systems.
The whole reason the administration went so hard, so long against the Tea Party people is that they posed a real, existential threat. They have awakened the movement, I think.
You’re dreaming. Obama is going to pardon all IRS workers who have committed felonies.
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