I can believe one person was assigned to this. Government inefficiency at it’s best.
What I can’t believe is that management did not know this, condone it, and cover it up. It is the job of the supervisors to monitor this and I am sure they were aware of the problem and realized the “political advantage” of allowing the problem to fester.
If you want to screw someone in a bureaucracy you simply assign inadequate or incapable staff to the problem and the rules of bureaucracy will screw it up. Add in a few lawyers to “give additional guidance” and all of a sudden you have created the Department of Motor Vehicles. Simple - saw it many times in the military with the worst of the necessary offices staffed with civilians who didn’t care.
It’s still a scandal. One thing I will give the article credit for is recognizing the problem foisted upon it by congress. Congress is infamous for unintended consequences with legislation and this is a perfect example. The comments to this article really piss me off. The Tea Party used the same “social” crap that leftists organizations have used for years. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
The job of management in all businesses outside of government is to identify and address problems that are not customer friendly. IRS management failed. We will probably find out the “best and brightest” were not assigned to process these applications and someone in the chain understood the political ramifications of this and condoned it by not addressing the problem and that is the cancer that must be removed and prosecuted.
The worst thing about government is this simple fact - if I took 2 years to submit my taxes I could be jailed. If they took 2 years to process my taxes they can excuse it with bureaucracy. This is the real danger of big government and this case should illustrate to Americans capable of simple analysis why Obamacare will be such a disaster.
They should depose the employees and grill the managers because that is who is responsible. Having GS-15’s and SES career civil servants blaming GS-5’s and GS-7’s is ridiculous. The little people are drones and they are not in a position to understand the big picture management does.
The IRS scandal illustrates the power of a bureaucracy and the danger of putting partisans in charge. The days of career civil servants who act in a non-partisan manner are fading. Dangerous. Very dangerous.
I think you are too trusting. They gave this to one agent because they wanted the Tea Party groups and other right-of-center groups to have to wait and wait and wait...
Did this inadequate or incapable staff also contact other government agencies to harass and intimidate? That lone specialist sure is a busy guy.
IRS wasn’t only agency hassling True the Vote
http://watchdog.org/85047/irs-wasnt-only-agency-hassling-true-the-vote/
Since filing for tax exemption as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2010, the founders of True the Vote, a Houston-based group that tries to prevent elections fraud, have been overwhelmed with scrutiny from a host of government agencies, in particular, by the Internal Revenue Service.
Catherine and Bryan Englebrecht have suffered through 18 separate encounters with five government agencies, from surprise audits to FBI visits to never-ending demands for paperwork.
The government has been scrutinizing True the Vote, the Engelbrechts’ tea party group, which is called King Street Patriots, and the family’s oil services manufacturing business.
True the Vote spokesman Logan Churchwell sent Watchdog.org a timeline of the encounters, which include two unscheduled audits by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, six visits or phone calls by the Federal Bureau of Investigation looking for domestic terrorists, five rounds of questioning by the IRS over True the Vote’s application and one round over King Street Patriot’s application, both of which were filed in July 2010, and neither of which has been approved yet.