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Breitbart News says IRS Targeted Company for Audit

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Photo Credit: REUTERSThe company that runs the conservative Breitbart.com news site says the IRS has selected the network for an audit, in a move company executives suggest is politically motivated.

Breitbart News Network, a California-based company which runs several conservative websites, says the IRS recently audited its 2012 financial information.

“The Obama administration’s timing on this is exquisite, but try as they might through various methods to silence us, we will only get more emboldened,” Stephen K. Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News Network, said in a written statement.

The audit comes as the agency faces sustained complaints that it targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny as they sought nonprofit status, before the agency ended the practice last year.

Since the practice was made public – by the IRS itself and the inspector general’s office – other conservative groups have come forward claiming they were subjected to unwarranted scrutiny by the agency.

Read more from this story HERE.

Issa Letter: DOJ Tried To Coordinate IRS Scandal Response With Democrats

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Photo Credit: Newsmax A press official at the Department of Justice attempted to coordinate the leak of documents concerning the IRS targeting scandal with Democratic staffers, but accidentally called the wrong office, according to House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa.

The official, which both Breitbart News and The Hill identified as Brian Fallon, called Oversight Friday afternoon.

The staffer who picked up the phone answered “Oversight Press,” according to Issa’s letter, which was sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday.

Thinking he had reached the office of U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Democratic ranking member of the oversight committee, Fallon said that the DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs would not okay the release of the documents, but that he was eager to do so anyway “before the Majority” – Issa’s office – could do so.

According to Issa’s letter, the documents concerned former Justice Department attorney Andrew Strelka, who worked with IRS Exempt Director Lois Lerner, who has been accused of unfairly targeting conservative groups.

Read more from this story HERE.

Can IRS Collect Obamacare Taxes When It Can’t Handle Tax Complaints?

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Photo Credit: APThe Internal Revenue Service is on the hot seat again as federal auditors blast the agency for not responding to taxpayer complaints in a timely manner.

The latest report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) reveals that between 2012 and 2013, the IRS failed to address at least 47 percent of complaints filed against tax preparers. The report also said that another 49 percent of the complaints sat unaddressed for at least two months.

This is significant auditors said because “the burden on taxpayers can include receiving an incorrect refund amount or even owing the IRS penalties and interest.”

There’s even more at stake than delays in handling complaints. This is the second scathing report in less than a month to question the agency’s productivity and work quality. In August, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said the IRS was struggling to collect a new tax that’s critical to financing the president’s health care law; auditors say the IRS’s flawed collecting process is allowing it to raise only three-quarters or so of the revenue that was originally expected.

The IRS had originally estimated that the tax would bring in about $1.2 billion in the second and third quarters of 2013 – but it’s only received $913.4 million.

Read more from this story HERE.

IRS: Five More Employees Lost Emails In Computer Crashes

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerThe Internal Revenue Service (IRS) lost emails from five more employees due to computer crashes, likely bringing the total number of computer crash victims tied to the IRS targeting scandal to more than 20.

The IRS added five more employees to its computer crash list Friday, the Associated Press reported. The new computer crash victims are linked to congressional investigations into the IRS scandal and include two more Cincinnati-based tax exempt agents who worked under Lois Lerner.

Read more from this story HERE.

IRS: By the Way, We Destroyed Lois Lerner's BlackBerry After Targeting Questions Started

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

If you missed my piece yesterday on Lerner’s reportedly not missing emails, click through and spend five minutes catching up on the evolving timeline. The “official” story keeps shifting, so it’s important to track the changes. This week’s previous development was that a Justice Department attorney informed a watchdog group that all government emails are, in fact, archived, but that retrieving the messages “destroyed” by Lerner’s hard drive crash/scratch would be more trouble than it’s worth. Now we have another drip of damning information, courtesy of Fox News:

Lois Lerner’s Blackberry was intentionally destroyed after Congress had begun its probe into IRS targeting of conservative groups, a senior IRS lawyer acknowledged in a sworn declaration. Thomas Kane, Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel for the IRS, wrote in the declaration, part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS, that the Blackberry was “removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.” That date – June 2012 – is significant because by that time, ex-IRS official Lerner had already been summoned before congressional staffers who interviewed her about reports of the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups. “We had already talked to her. Our personal staff and Oversight Committee staff had sat down with Ms. Lerner and confronted her about information we were getting from conservative groups in the state of Ohio and around the country,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News.

Read more from this story HERE.

IRS Lawyer: Lois Lerner's Blackberry Deliberately Destroyed after Start of Congressional Probe

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Photo Credit: Mast Irham / EPA

Photo Credit: Mast Irham / EPA

Lois Lerner’s Blackberry was intentionally destroyed after Congress had begun its probe into IRS targeting of conservative groups, a senior IRS lawyer acknowledged in a sworn declaration.

Thomas Kane, Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel for the IRS, wrote in the declaration, part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS, that the Blackberry was “removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.”

That date – June 2012 – is significant because by that time, ex-IRS official Lerner had already been summoned before congressional staffers who interviewed her about reports of the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups.

“We had already talked to her. Our personal staff and Oversight Committee staff had sat down with Ms. Lerner and confronted her about information we were getting from conservative groups in the state of Ohio and around the country,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Justice Department Admits that the Federal Government Has ALL of Lois Lerner’s Emails

By Bryan Preston.

Judicial Watch just dropped a bombshell in the IRS targeting investigation.

Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe. The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search. The DOJ attorneys also acknowledged that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) is investigating this back-up system.

We obviously disagree that disclosing the emails as required would be onerous, and plan to raise this new development with Judge Sullivan.

Read more from this story HERE.

Judge Issues New Order to IRS: Your Excuse For "Lost" Emails is Invalid

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

After listening to excuses from IRS officials about why they cannot produce “lost” emails requested through a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan has ordered the IRS to come up with a better explanation as to why the agency cannot produce valid documentation. He’s also asking for details about IRS hard drive destruction policy and wants verification from an outside source that IRS hard drives in question were in fact destroyed as officials have claimed.

“In an extraordinary step, U. S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan has launched an independent inquiry into the issue of the missing emails associated with former IRS official Lois Lerner,” President of Judicial Watch John Fitton said in a statement…

Read more from this story HERE.

Federal Judge Orders IRS to Provide More Details of Lerner Computer Crash

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

A federal judge is demanding the IRS provide a more detailed explanation of what happened to the potentially thousands of missing emails of former agency official Lois Lerner.

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on Thursday ordered the IRS to provide a new sworn declaration giving more details about Lerner’s computer troubles, just days after the IRS submitted several to the court as part of a case brought against the agency by a conservative watchdog group.

Sullivan said the IRS must provide the declaration from an official with the “authority to speak under oath for the agency” by August 22. IRS officials previously said under oath that Lerner’s emails were lost when her computer crashed, and technicians were unable to recover the drive’s data.

Sullivan said the explanation must include how the IRS attempted to retrieve the emails of Lerner, a central figure in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups, from alternative sources such as mobile devices. Sullivan also asked the IRS to explain in detail how the agency tracks hard drives when they are being serviced and provide information from an outside source to verify the agency’s policy regarding the destruction of hard drives.

Read more from this story HERE.

IRS Quietly Abolishes Mandatory Expiration Dates For Illegal Immigrants’ Taxpayer Status

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

By Patrick Howley.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) quietly changed regulations to allow more undocumented immigrants to keep their taxpayer status through a program that is rife with fraud and abuse, and to delay deactivation of immigrant taxpayer status until 2016.

The IRS now prevents peoples’ Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) from automatically expiring after five years as previously mandated. Now immigrants can keep their ITIN so long as they pay taxes at least once in a five-year period.

The ITIN program is primarily used by undocumented workers to follow the law and file income taxes in the United States. Reports came out during the IRS scandal linking ITIN fraud to billions in lost taxpayer dollars. The IRS was forced to reform the ITIN program at the start of 2013 – but this new regulation undoes that reform.

“The IRS will not deactivate an ITIN that has been used on at least one tax return in the past five years,” the IRS said in an explainer of the new policy. “To give all interested parties time to adjust and allow the IRS to reprogram its systems, the IRS will not begin deactivating ITINs until 2016…The new, more uniform policy applies to any ITIN, regardless of when it was issued.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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Border Agent: ‘Morale Is at an All-Time Low Right Now’

By Andrew Johnson.

Teenage criminals and gang members from Central America have been using “a loophole” to stay in the country, border agent Chris Cabrera revealed. Under current policy, unaccompanied minors are allowed to stay in the country if they have family in the United States and say they have none in their home country, regardless of their background.

“Even if he is a confirmed gang member, a confirmed criminal, even by self-admission, we for some reason don’t send them back to their home country — we release them into our country,” Cabrera said.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Fox News Latino

Photo Credit: Fox News Latino

Nearly 100 Bodies Of Deceased Immigrants Found In Arizona Desert Since October

By EFE / Fox News.

The U.S. Border Patrol has found the bodies of 97 undocumented immigrants in the Arizona desert over the past 10 months, the latest being that of a 19-year-old youth.

“We got a call from a man asking for help. He told us he was crossing the mountains with his son who was hit by lightning. When the agents arrived he was already dead,” Andres Adame, spokesman for the Border Patrol in Tucson told Efe.

Despite the decline in the number of undocumented immigrants crossing the border and the number of arrests in Arizona, people are still dying in the desert, since, Adame said, besides supporting the high summer temperatures they also have to weather the storms, which can strike at any time and very quickly move on.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Fournier: Executive Action on Immigration Would Be ‘a Nuclear Bomb’

By Andrew Johnson.

If President Obama grants legal status to millions of immigrants in the country illegally through executive action, he will drastically divide the nation and totally discount his presidential pledge, National Journal’s Ron Fournier said. Fournier, who believes the immigrants should get legal status, argued executive orders would be the worst way to do it.

Read more from this story HERE.

Pastors to Defy IRS Snoops by Daring Them to Place them Under Arrest

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Photo Credit: Alex Wong / Getty

Photo Credit: Alex Wong / Getty

As The Examiner reported Monday, the IRS entered into an agreement with an atheist group to monitor pastors and churches in order to “catch” suspected offenders of engaging in “unacceptable” speech from the pulpits across America. The agency threatens to revoke the tax exempt status of churches that point out government infractions against Biblical teaching, particularly politicians and candidates that support points of view that are in direct violation of clear moral and ethical precepts in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

But the pastors of these churches, which happen to be some of the largest megachurches in America, say they plan on banding together to defy the IRS on the annual “Freedom of the Pulpit Sunday” coming up in October. According to several spokesmen within the pulpit freedom movement, the pastors will inform their congregants that IRS spies may be in the congregation that day and that they, the pastors, have no intention of adhering to the rules of the IRS that demand that they cease from preaching on homosexuality, gay marriage, abortion, and other hot topics. The plan is for the pastors to dare the IRS agents to come forward and arrest them on the spot so that all of America can see what a farce the federal government has become.

America has always stood for complete freedom of speech in the pulpit, and it has always been assumed that pastors will hit public issues hard when the Bible addresses those issues head-on. This is fully exhibited in our history. Pastors were among the first to openly call for independence from Britain. Pastors were also among the first to condemn the practice of slavery, which ultimately led to its abolition. The church is under no obligation whatsoever to adhere to politically correct speech or to refrain from addressing ethical, moral, and public issues that are addressed in the Bible.

But progressive/totalitarian tyrants wish to silence the voice of preachers and churches unless they endorse the actions of the modern collectivist government in America. Such a move would solidify the control that the government increasingly exercises on its citizens.

Read more from this story HERE.