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In what many could only expect to read in a fiction novel, it has been discovered that the emails of more IRS agents have gone missing. The IRS blamed “routinely experienced” computer crashes for all the lost emails, and said that all the crashes happened well before Congress launched its investigations. On Friday, Mark Levin suggested that “[t]hey must be working overtime over at the Internal Revenue Service, or as I call it, the IRSS. And over there at the IRSS, they’re busy issuing press releases and other information, I thought, when the government’s closed.” According to the Associated Press,...

Surprise! The IRS claims it has lost emails belonging to even more employees embroiled in the scandal surrounding the targeting of conservatives. Guy covered the details of the newest revelations earlier today and the AP reported about the lost emails over the weekend. The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status. The tax agency said in June that it could not locate an untold number of emails to and from Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS division that processes...

More Swiss banks are dropping out of the U.S. banking program that the IRS supposedly uses to prevent American citizens from stashing cash overseas to avoid taxes. Known for 100 years as the original tax haven, free from the prying eyes of governments around the world, Swiss banks have provided banking services that guaranteed anonymity to arms dealers, Nazis, and law-abiding Americans alike.Offshore banks, especially Swiss banks, are not generally used to evade taxes however. The government already has enforcement mechanisms in place to prevent tax evasion by the use of offshore banks by American citizens. No smart rich person,...

ZURICH (Reuters) - At least 10 Swiss banks have withdrawn from a U.S. program aimed at settling a tax dispute between them and the United States, Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag said on Sunday, quoting unnamed sources. Around 100 Swiss banks came forward at the end of last year to work with U.S. authorities in a program brokered by the Swiss government to help the banks make amends for aiding tax evasion. "At least 10 banks that had decided at the end of 2013 to pay a fine have withdrawn their decision," NZZ am Sonntag said, quoting unnamed lawyers and...

Silicon Valley companies are known to cater to their hard working employees. Free yoga classes, nap rooms and meals are among the perks their workers enjoy. A recent Wall Street Journal report reveals that the Internal Revenue Service could be targeting these fringe benefits, more specifically "employer-provided meals" in the next fiscal year. In the agency’s recently released Priority Guidance Plan for 2014 to 2015, the IRS states that the free meals will now be considered a taxable fringe benefit, the same way a company car or phone is. Rather than taxing employees themselves -- an arduous if not impossible...

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich), chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is preparing a report that will absolve the IRS and Lois Lerner of any wrongdoing in the campaign to target and harass conservative political organizations. “Those who have alleged that Lerner and the IRS took it upon themselves to conduct a vendetta against conservative organizations have it all wrong,” Levin alleged. “Evidence has emerged that the IRS was acting upon urgent requests from highly placed members of the government. Bureaucrats being responsive to the needs of the government is behavior we should be encouraging not punishing.” The highly...

In June, IRS commissioner John Koskinen testified he had no idea who tipped off Obama officials, much sooner than Congress, about missing IRS emails. "Did you cause someone to find out at the White House, at Treasury, or your IG?" Representative Darrell Issa asked Koskinen on June 23rd. "I did not," answered Koskinen. "And if you have any evidence of that, I'd be happy to see it." "I asked a question," said Issa. "And I answered it," replied Koskinen. In a new development, we've learned it was IRS Commission John Koskinen's own chief legal advisor at the IRS, Catherine Duval,...

A Senate report released Friday criticized the IRS Inspector General's investigation into whether the tax agency targeted conservative tea party groups for excessive and burdensome scrutiny during the 2012 election cycle. The report, written by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, acknowledged that the IRS did mismanage applications from groups applying for tax exemption, but it argued that mismanagement affected both liberal and conservative groups. "The subcommittee found no evidence that political bias influences the decisions made by IRS personnel," the report stated. "A review of nearly 800,000 pages of documents and nearly two dozen interviews produced no evidence of political bias...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status.

A top House Republican on Thursday accused the Justice Department of helping a former department lawyer duck an interview about the IRS’s improper scrutiny of Tea Party groups. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) pressed Attorney General Eric Holder to provide contact information for Andrew Strelka to the House Oversight Committee by Friday. Republicans say that Strelka’s tenure with the government illustrates a conflict of interest in the Obama administration’s investigation into the IRS scandal. Strelka once worked for Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center of the controversy. After moving to the Justice Department, Strelka defended the IRS against...

The IRS's internal auditor distorted the facts surrounding the IRS tea party targeting scandal, leaving Americans with the impression that the tax agency went after conservative groups without also targeting liberal groups, the Senate's top investigative panel said Friday. Investigators said the IRS did mishandle applications for tax exempt status, including subjecting groups to years-long delays and "poorly coordinated reviews." But the report, written by Democrats who control the chamber, concluded that the IRS's "mismanagement" affected both liberal and conservative groups, clearing the agency of accusations of politically motivated behavior. "The subcommittee found no evidence that political bias influences the...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released a new batch of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) email documents revealing that under former IRS official Lois Lerner, the agency seems to acknowledge having needlessly solicited donor lists from non-profit political groups. According to a May 21, 2012, memo from the IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel: “such information was not needed across-the-board and not used in making the agency’s determination on exempt status.” Later, in her May 10, 2013, remarks in which Lerner first revealed in response to question she planted about the IRS targeting of conservative groups, she conceded that the requests...

Link to August 29, 2014 Court document EXCERPTS: Since the Service’s last status update on April 30, 2014, the Service has produced 2,746 of responsive documents as follows: 315 pages on May 23, 2014, 205 pages on June 30, 2014, 865 pages on July 31, 2014, and 1,361 pages on August 27, 2014 ... Counsel for the Service conferred with counsel for Judicial Watch prior to filing this Status Report. Judicial Watch takes the position that filing a status report is inappropriate at this juncture because the Court ordered the parties, on July 10, 2014, to file a status report...

The official at the center of the Internal Revenue Service tea party scandal once dismissed complaints that labor unions were not reporting millions of dollars in political activities on their tax forms, according to an email obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. In 2007, Lerner responded directly to a complaint that some major labor unions reported completely different amounts of political expenditures when filing with the IRS and the Department of Labor. At the time of the email, Lerner was the Director of Exempt Organizations at the IRS. Lerner wrote, “We looked at the information you provided regarding organizations...

Subpoenas hit allies of Scott Walker as his re-election campaign looms. Americans learned in the IRS political targeting scandal that government enforcement power can be used to stifle political speech. Something similar may be unfolding in Wisconsin, where a special prosecutor is targeting conservative groups that participated in the battle over Governor Scott Walker's union reforms. In recent weeks, special prosecutor Francis Schmitz has hit dozens of conservative groups with subpoenas demanding documents related to the 2011 and 2012 campaigns to recall Governor Walker and state legislative leaders. Copies of two subpoenas we've seen demand "all memoranda, email . ....

If you got health coverage through President Barack Obama's law this year, you'll need a new form from your insurance exchange before you can file your tax return next spring. Some tax professionals are worried that federal and state insurance marketplaces won't be able to get those forms out in time, creating the risk of delayed tax refunds for millions of consumers. The same federal agency that had trouble launching HealthCare.gov last fall is facing the heaviest lift. The Health and Human Services Department must send out millions of the forms, which are like W-2s for people getting tax credits...

Over the last two years, the U.S. has had a spike in expatriations. It isn’t exactly Ellis Island in reverse, but it’s more than a dribble. With global tax reporting and FATCA, the list of the individuals who renounced is up. For 2013, there was a 221% increase, with record numbers of Americans renouncing. The Treasury Department is required to publish a quarterly list, but these numbers are under-stated, some say considerably. The presence or absence of tax motivation is no longer relevant, but that could change. After Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin departed for Singapore, Senators Chuck Schumer and Bob...

The historian Jeffrey Herf writes at the American Interest of the emergence of a pro-Hamas left: On July 31, 2014, a group of left-leaning historians called “Historians Against the War” posted an open letter to President Obama denouncing Israel’s actions in the Gaza War and calling for a cut-off of American military assistance to Israel. On August 13, the letter was posted on the website of the History News Network. On August 13, the signers reported that “in less than twenty-four hours over two hundred US, based [sic] historians had signed the letter.” This remarkable turnout depended on the mobilization...

The nation’s top television news broadcasts - in both English and Spanish - have been entirely mum on the latest revelations related to alleged obstruction of justice and politically-directed abuse of power at the Obama administration’s Internal Revenue Service. Whether at ABC, CBS and NBC, or Univision, Telemundo and Mundo Fox, these networks to date have essentially censored the admission by a U.S. Justice Department official –revealed by government watchdog group Judicial Watch – that allegedly lost e-mails of Obama IRS official Lois Lerner are in fact accessible, through the federal government’s computer back-up system. As Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton...

Take a bow Stephen Colbert, your fake news show term “truthiness” has just been adopted by your government. It’s been shortened to “truthy” and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the old “Attack Watch” organization which was later acquired by the newly incorporated “Truth Team.” (I explained how this worked back when the merger was originally announced in 2012.)  In case you’ve forgotten, the role of those totally impartial organizations was to turn Right Wingers in to the authorities for telling lies about Big Guy - so the IRS could audit them.  “The Truth Team is a network of supporters...