According to the Internal Revenue Service, an organization seeking tax-exempt status should be subject to special (and implicitly hostile) scrutiny if its “issues include government spending, government debt or taxes.”
Indeed, officials at the IRS were issued a BOLO on this — BOLO meaning a “be on the lookout order.”
Yes, you read that right: If a group’s issue included “taxes,” the tax enforcers of the federal government were going to “be on the lookout” for it. The IRS would devote extra attention to the question of whether an organization skeptical of the US tax system — for which the IRS serves as the collector — should be shut down.
For that is what denying a nonprofit group a tax exemption does: shuts it down.
Trust me. I know. I run a nonprofit called Commentary Inc. We publish a monthly magazine and a Web site dedicated to conservative ideas. In 2009, we went through a year-long investigation of our tax status. If we had lost it, Commentary would’ve closed.
That language about examining groups whose issues include government spending and taxes came out of a meeting at the IRS on June 29, 2011. That meeting included the IRS’s director of Exempt Organizations, Lois Lerner — who on Friday apologized for what she called “inappropriate” attention given conservative groups by “low-level” employees operating out of Cincinnati.
How nice.
Of course the apology was nonsense. Yesterday, ABC published a draft version of congressional investigators’ timeline of the IRS’s conduct toward these groups.
It turns out the Treasury inspector general has been looking into the IRS’s treatment of conservative groups. The IRS learned the results were going public this week.
That is what caused Lerner’s apology. Not genuine regret.
The timeline also reveals that BOLO alerts involving conservative groups had been in play for 10 months — 10 months! — before that June 29, 2011, meeting.
Note that she tried to blame people under her — but the timeline plainly shows she was involved.
Lerner did request revisions — but not to the language that would trigger the scrutiny. She wanted revisions only to the types of nonprofits to be scrutinized.
Something stinks at the IRS, and to high heaven. The question is how big that something is, and how high up the rot goes.
In 2012, IRS Commissioner Doug Schulman told the House Ways and Means Committee there was no truth to rumors floating about that Tea Party groups were under an IRS microscope: “There is absolutely no targeting,” he said. He’d better hope there’s no record that he was informed of it.
We learned late yesterday that acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller knew about the policy in June 2012.
Some looking for a bright side, or a way out of the scandal, point out that all scrutinized groups were reportedly granted their nonprofit status. We have no reason to believe these early reports are true.
But even if they are, undergoing this kind of scrutiny is the opposite of painless for the organizations in question. It’s immensely time-consuming, it’s invasive, it’s intrusive and it’s intimidating — seemingly on purpose.
David French, a lawyer who has represented some of the groups in question, points out that a Tennessee group was asked to list “each past or present board member, officer, key employee and members of their families”who had served on the board of another organization — and has been or plans to be a candidate for public office. Members of their families?
You may imagine this is a violation of free-speech rights. It’s not. You don’t have a right to a tax exemption, and the IRS has almost unlimited power to deny it to your group.
So you must cooperate, and provide immense amounts of information, and hire legal counsel and eat up dozens if not hundreds of hours of work time that could have been spent furthering your cause.
And that is the political brilliance behind the effort — for which all due cynical respect needs to be paid to whomever came up with this BOLO tie in the first place.
President Obama, who condemned the IRS scrutiny yesterday, loves to complain that politicians making arguments against him are engaging in “distraction.” Siccing the IRS on people who are pursuing ideas contrary to the interests of the sitting administration is the politics of distraction in its purest and most disturbing form.