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IRS Accused Of Sharing 2,500 Private Taxpayer Documents With White House By Cheryl K. Chumley November 28, 2014 The Internal Revenue Service may have given thousands of confidential filings from private taxpayers to the White House to review, a lawsuit against the Treasury Department just revealed. The suit, filed against Treasury’s inspector general by Cause of Action, a legal advocacy outfit, reveals a steady stream of communication went on between the White House and the IRS — a potentially “improper” stream, the group alleged, The Daily Caller reported.

Up to 30,000 missing emails sent by former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner have been recovered by the IRS inspector general, five months after they were deemed lost forever. The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) informed congressional staffers from several committees on Friday that the emails were found among hundreds of “disaster recovery tapes” that were used to back up the IRS email system. “They just said it took them several weeks and some forensic effort to get these emails off these tapes,” a congressional aide told the Washington Examiner.

The Internal Revenue Service, which claims to be so understaffed that it can’t bother to collect unpaid taxes, or search backup tapes for Lois Lerner’s “missing” emails, apparently has plenty of time to read the comment threads on conservative blogs that have been critical of the agency (Hi there, IRS agents!). William Jacobson, one of the best-informed and most effective critics of the agency, writes on Legal Insurrection: Hey, remember the Reader Poll we did about whether it was okay to follow and try to interview Lois Lerner in her neighborhood? Do you approve of media confronting Lois Lerner in...

Judicial Watch announced today that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted to the court that it failed to search any of the IRS standard computer systems for the “missing” emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials. The admission appears in an IRS legal brief opposing the Judicial Watch request that a federal court judge allow discovery into how “lost and/or destroyed” IRS records relating to the targeting of conservative groups may be retrieved.

“…it has become apparent that the IRS did not undertake any significant efforts to obtain the emails from alternative sources following the discovery that the emails were missing” (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted to the court that it failed to search any of the IRS standard computer systems for the “missing” emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials. The admission appears in anIRS legal brief opposing the Judicial Watch request that a federal court judge allow discovery into how “lost and/or destroyed” IRS records relating to the targeting of...

Democratic New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen was principally involved in a plot with Lois Lerner and President Barack Obama’s political appointee at the IRS to lead a program of harassment against conservative nonprofit groups during the 2012 election, according to letters exclusively obtained by The Daily Caller. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) did not want to publicly release 2012 correspondences exchanged between the IRS and Jeanne Shaheen at her personal Washington office: the agency delayed releasing the information to a major conservative super PAC multiple times, even threatening to see the super PAC in court, according to emails. (RELATED: Lois...

The Internal Revenue Service has seized the bank accounts of hundreds of innocent business owners. Using the powers granted under the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000, which was designed to help federal agencies catch drug dealers, terrorists and other criminals, the IRS has been legally seizing the bank accounts of law-abiding business owners who have consistently made cash bank deposits less than the federal bank reporting minimum of $10,000. The New York Times reported that hundreds of these cash-only business had their entire bank accounts seized by the IRS in the past few years because the agency is...

People say America is one of the most religious countries in the world. But is it religious in the way that you think it is? You’re bound to learn something new in this list:

You might think that with the scandal surrounding the IRS and the resulting budget cuts that have hampered their activities that the organization might become more aware of its procedures and adjust them to appear more customer friendly. If what happened this past week is any indication then they are still living somewhere in the ozone. Most Americans think of April 15th as the final day for filing their personal income tax return. That is so for most people, but a large part of the population files an extension that allows them to file their return by October 15th as...

The producer of a new movie that criticizes Obamacare has reportedly become the latest prominent conservative slapped with an IRS audit. Logan Clements, producer of “Sick and Sicker: ObamaCare Canadian Style,” announced via press release Tuesday that he is being audited for the first time ever. “I had never been audited before I made this movie,” he says in a YouTube video. “There seems to be a pattern here.” The news comes one month after the conservative Breitbart News announced that it, too, was being audited and that the action was probably politically motivated. Mr. Clements‘ movie makes the case...

While strong cases can be made for both Benghazi and Fast and Furious, most voters consider Barack Obama’s misuse of the IRS to be his administration’s worst scandal so far. But, as we wrote last year, targeting of conservative non-profits for harassment is not the only dimension of the IRS scandal. In addition, there is strong reason to believe that one or more White House political appointees have illegally accessed private taxpayer information and used it for political gain.Austan Goolsbee directed Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and later chaired his Council of Economic Advisers. In August 2010, Goolsbee conducted...

In his decision, U.S. District Judge Ronald White concluded Tuesday that the IRS rule altering the Obamacare law and providing billions in subsidies is "arbitrary, capricious and abuse of discretion": "The court holds that the IRS rule is arbitrary, capricious, and abuse of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with law, pursuant to 5 U.S.C.706(2)(A), in excess of summary jurisdiction, authority or limitation, or short of statutory right, pursuant to 5 U.S.C. 706(2)(C), or otherwise is an invalidation of the ACA [Affordable Care Act], and is hereby vacated. The court's order of vacatur is stayed, however, pending resolution of any...

There may be a pattern involving the IRS losing e-mails and other key computer records. For months, the House Oversight Committee has been pursuing the lost e-mails of Lois Lerner and other figures in the IRS tax-exempt organization scandal. Now, the private-jet company NetJets is claiming in a lawsuit that as part of its tax dispute with the agency the IRS “wiped clean a number of computer hard drives containing emails and other electronic documents that the Government was required to produce.” NetJets sued the IRS in 2011, claiming that it improperly applied a ticket tax on users of its...

The IRS failed to take all required steps for collecting unpaid taxes from people it can’t locate in over half the cases that investigators studied, potentially costing the government a pile of lost revenue, according to a federal report released Monday. The study does not estimate exactly how much money the IRS might collect if its workers were conducting all the research they are supposed to perform to find the taxpayers. The investigators wrote that in 2012, the IRS declared $6.7 billion in unpaid taxes to be uncollectable—involving nearly 483,000 tax returns—because it couldn’t find the taxpayers. Of that total,...

This week the IRS conservative targeting scandal turned 500 days old. It’s been 500 days since we learned that Lois Lerner’s former agency targeted right-leaning groups applying for nonprofit status and audited ones that already exist. And it has been 500 days since I righteously decided to stop paying my taxes.500 days later, the IRS still hasn’t produced emails from Lerner and the more than 20 other IRS employees whose computers allegedly crashed, whose Blackberries were thrown away and “upgraded,” and, in Lerner’s case, whose hard drive was “scratched” and destroyed. But we know that Lerner exchanged confidential taxpayer information...

Lois Lerner, the central figure in the IRS scandal, is breaking her silence in an unapologetic interview where she says she's not sorry and maintains she “didn’t do anything wrong” -- despite widely documented evidence that her division targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny. The former head of the tax-exempt unit, speaking with Politico, gave her first media interview since the scandal broke 16 months ago. She has twice refused to answer questions before Congress, but used the interview to publicly assert her innocence. "I know I did the best I could under the circumstances and am not sorry for...

Yet another indication of the endemic corruption that infests the Obama administration, their Democrat colleagues and a willfully somnambulant mainstream media In a letter written to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), Issa reveals there was an attempt to coordinate media spin regarding the IRS investigation between the DOJ and the staff of the Committee’s Ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). How did Issa find out? A DOJ official in the Office of Public Affairs who thought he was calling Cummings’ office, mistakenly phoned Issa’s office instead.

IRS: An aide to the attorney general accidentally calls the office of the House Oversight Committee chairman, asking for help in spinning the defense of the agency whose head just said they obey the law when they can. We have commented many times of the all-too-cozy relationship between the IRS and Democratic members of the House and Senate, with members writing to the agency demanding that specific conservative groups and political action committees they find particularly irritating be subject to the "special scrutiny" that the Tea Party and other conservative and religious groups were subjected to in the ongoing scandal....

A remarkable conversation about the IRSÂ’s illegal targeting of conservative groups took place on Friday in Washington. According to Rep. Darrell IssaÂ’s office, at 5:01 Friday Brian Fallon, a former aide to Chuck Schumer and currently a communications aide to Attorney General Eric Holder, called IssaÂ’s office. By mistake. And itÂ’s quite a mistake.The purpose of the call, according to a letter Issa wrote to Holder, was to work with the intended recipient of the call to strategically leak damaging information to selected, friendly reporters and to coordinate a damage-control plan. The intended recipient of the call was apparently Rep....

IRS: As the 2014 midterms approach, what has become a political arm of the Obama administration has targeted — as it targeted the Tea Party — a leading conservative truth-teller that has exposed so many of its lies. Even as the IRS races to cover up a prior abuse of power, it ruthlessly engages in another, using its power to tax in an attempt to destroy the vast truth-gathering enterprise launched by the late Andrew Breitbart, which the administration apparently ranks right alongside the Tea Party atop its enemies list. Last Friday, the IRS stretched credulity beyond the breaking point...