Inspector General: IRS' Ineffective Management Allowed Tea Party Targeting

The IRS used "inappropriate criteria" when judging organizations hoping to gain a tax-exempt status and allowed that criteria to stay in place for 18 months, according to a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report obtained in advance of its official release by The Huffington Post. The much-anticipated report notes that the IRS suffered from "ineffective management" which allowed for agency officials to discriminate against Tea Party groups, often resulting in "substantial delays" in process applications and "unnecessary" information requests. The tax agency has taken some action to remedy this, the report found. But more needs to be done so that "the public has reasonable assurance that applications are process without unreasonable delay in a fair and impartial manner." The Inspector General took several pools of applications considered by the IRS to determine whether the agency's bias against conservative groups was symptomatic or random. In all, the IG chose 244 open and closed application cases in which the IRS had determined that it "needed significant additional information" from the applicant, and 94 cases in which the IRS said it had not needed additional significant information. It also examined 298 cases that the processing specialists had "identified" and sought to determine "whether they were correctly identified."

Huffington Post