Posted on 05/19/2013 5:41:58 AM PDT by Pharmboy
During the summer of 2010, the dozen or so accountants and tax agents of Group 7822 of the Internal Revenue Service office in Cincinnati got a directive from their manager. A growing number of organizations identifying themselves as part of the Tea Party had begun applying for tax exemptions, the manager said, advising the workers to be on the lookout for them and other groups planning to get involved in elections.
“I don’t believe there’s any such thing as rogue agents,” said Bonnie Esrig, a former senior manager in the I.R.S. office in Cincinnati.
The specialists, hunched over laptops on the office’s fourth floor, rarely discussed politics, one former supervisor said. Low-level employees in what many in the I.R.S. consider a backwater, they processed thousands of applications a year, mostly from charities like private schools or hospitals.
For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words like “patriots,” “we the people” — as a way to search efficiently through the flood of applications for groups that might not quality for exemptions, according to the I.R.S. inspector general. “Triage,” the agency’s acting chief described it.
As a grim-faced President Obama denounced the “inexcusable” actions of the I.R.S. last week and lawmakers of both parties lined up in Washington on Friday to accuse it of an array of misconduct, everything seemed so clear: the nation’s tax agency had deliberately targeted conservative activists, violating the public trust — and perhaps the law.
While there are still many gaps in the story of how the I.R.S. scandal happened, interviews with current and former employees and with lawyers who dealt with them, along with a review of I.R.S. documents, paint a more muddled...alienated from the broader I.R.S. culture and given little direction.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Click through to read the last two paragraphs where an IRS Cincinnati worker gives a good quote saying, essentially, that she does not think this could have happened without DC direction. THAT should have been the lead.
And, they name the woman who was the "lone IRS agent."
BS Meter on overload.
Yeah, it’s such a non-scandal that the Obama Admin sat on it for months before the November election.
beeeee essssssssss
Ohio, my eye.
The White House ordered the illegal tax torture
Just because the NYT couldn’t see Stalin killing and starving the Ukranians or the rest of Russia for that matter, the Turks killing Armenians, or those pesky Jews in deathcamps doesn’t mean they are covering up the Fascist Obama Administration.
Then our side needs to shut down that office. Lets see the leftist pigs squeal.
Heh...just wait until the IRS starts managing Obamacare and see what happens then.
Given that it was imposed by constitutional amendment, one cannot argue that the income tax is unconstitutional per se. But certainly, it is at odds with the spirit, if not the letter, of many of our most basic constitutional rights.
Consider that the income tax system has the following attributes:
Notwithstanding our 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination, as well as our 9th Amendment right to privacy (see Roe v. Wade), the government requires us to provide a tax return signed under penalty of perjury, in which we are obligated to provide detailed testimony regarding every aspect of our financial activities and relationships, legal or otherwise.
Notwithstanding our 4th Amendment rights against search and seizure, any American citizen is subject at any time -- even in the complete absence of probable cause – to an intrusive federal audit in which the government has the unmitigated right to demand and search our private papers and financial records.
Notwithstanding our 5th Amendment rights against seizure of our property without due process, the government can seize and hold our financial assets indefinitely without a trial.
The complexity of the Tax Code generally requires that Americans hire professional advice, often at significant expense, to help ensure compliance.
The Tax Code is so complex that its meaning is not always clear even to experts or employees of the federal government, and its enforcement may be subject to arbitrary interpretation by federal employees who may, in fact, disagree with each other.
The income tax requires citizens to bear the burden of preparing, maintaining, storing and recovering voluminous sets of records over a period of years, where such records otherwise have no useful purpose except to assist the government in enforcing the tax code against the citizen.
The Tax Code provides our federal legislators with a means of bestowing specifically targeted benefits on favored special interests.
Question 1: If Determinations was a dead end job, why would the dead enders care? They weren’t going anywhere. Grab the rubber stamp until Carpal Tunnel sets in. Question 2:
Could they have been planted in the “backwater” to do just what they did? Question 3: How many are still there vs how many have been promoted or transferred? Question 3: Why were some applications treated differently from other applications? Sounds like “Animal Farm”. Question 4:Who wrote the directive memo? Question 5: Does anyone remember the Brit eggheads at Bletchley Park? They were in a “backwater” as well but their contribution to winning WWII is inestimable. Conclusion: The IRS action was a civil Black Ops to do just what it did.
Here's my favorite quote from the article in reference to the Cincinnati IRS office staff: "Few if any of the employees were experts on tax law,..."
Not only does the Obama regime know nothing, they don't know about tax law at the IRS office. That should be a line from an Onion article.
Start with the low level worker and move up the food chain. Reading lists?
WHO CAME UP WITH THOSE LISTS OF QUESTIONS.?
Anyone who’d buy this story would also buy the NYT Sunday edition.
LOL!
-——— The Specialists———
Translation: The apparatchiks
Outside the Cincinnati office on Thursday, employees on smoking breaks voiced many complaints. Pay freezes, mandatory furloughs and the effects of sequestration were all testing their already low morale. But the scandal, some said, had made things worse.
It's only a dream, but we should hope their morale gets low enough that they all quit! (They never will, of course.)
During the summer of 2010, the dozen or so accountants and tax agents of Group 7822 of the Internal Revenue Service office in Cincinnati got a directive from their manager. A growing number of organizations identifying themselves as part of the Tea Party had begun applying for tax exemptions, the manager said, advising the workers to be on the lookout for them and other groups planning to get involved in elections....Do they have editors over there?...interviews with current and former employees and with lawyers who dealt with them, along with a review of I.R.S. documents, paint a more muddled picture of an understaffed Cincinnati outpost that was alienated from the broader I.R.S. culture and given little direction.
They were given a directive but little direction.
That sounds like a contradiction to me.
REPEALING THE 16TH AMENDMENT would be a great start to restoring our lost representative republic. Then start work on repealing all that followed with the exception of the twenty first.
Not even close, NYT. I'm supposed to pretend that two offices in CA and the main office in DC weren't doing exactly the same thing, with the same discriminatory criteria, to generate the same kinds of letters, at the same time.
This is nothing more than a NY Times “cover their asses” piece. Propaganda.
The more writers the Slimes uses on a story, the bigger the lie. By using three people, they are leading the reader to believe they did their due diligence.
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