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The IRS has been found to be targeting pro-life and conservative groups because of their positions and, this summer, a tape was released showing a disturbing phone call the Internal Revenue Service placed to a non-profit organization telling it to keep its Christian faith and views on abortion to itself.
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Photo Credit: APTax cheats armed with stolen identification numbers are costing the Treasury billions of dollars a year, according to a new audit.
Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration says that, in 2011 alone, tax cheats were able to steal or falsely obtain some 285,000 employee identification numbers, which the IRS uses to identify a taxpayer’s business account.
In all, the IRS could be issuing around $2.3 billion a year in these sorts of false payments — or around $11.4 billion over a five-year span.
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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstAn IRS official blasted Lois Lerner for her attempt to blame the agency’s targeting scandal on low-level employees in Cincinnati, according to newly released emails.
“Cincinnati wasn’t publicly ‘thrown under the bus’ (but) instead was hit by a convoy of Mack trucks,” wrote Cindy Thomas, former director of the IRS exempt organizations office in Cincinnati, in a May 10, 2013 email to Lerner obtained by the House Ways and Means Committee.
Thomas wrote the email on the very day that the IRS targeting scandal broke when Lerner, a senior agency official based in Washington, D.C., admitted that her exempt organizations division engaged in improper targeting of conservative groups.
Lerner initially claimed that the agency’s Cincinatti office was solely responsible for the practice. The New York Times went to bat for the administration, characterizing the Cincinatti office as a “backwater” filled with “low-level employees.”
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Photo Credit: MELINA YINGLING AND DANNY DOUGHERTY — MCTU.S. agencies collected and shared the personal information of thousands of Americans in an attempt to root out untrustworthy federal workers that ended up scrutinizing people who had no direct ties to the U.S. government and simply had purchased certain books.
Federal officials gathered the information from the customer records of two men who were under criminal investigation for purportedly teaching people how to pass lie detector tests. The officials then distributed a list of 4,904 people – along with many of their Social Security numbers, addresses and professions – to nearly 30 federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.
Although the polygraph-beating techniques are unproven, authorities hoped to find government employees or applicants who might have tried to use them to lie during the tests required for security clearances. Officials with multiple agencies confirmed that they’d checked the names in their databases and planned to retain the list in case any of those named take polygraphs for federal jobs or criminal investigations.
It turned out, however, that many people on the list worked outside the federal government and lived across the country. Among the people whose personal details were collected were nurses, firefighters, police officers and private attorneys, McClatchy learned. Also included: a psychologist, a cancer researcher and employees of Rite Aid, Paramount Pictures, the American Red Cross and Georgetown University.
Moreover, many of them had only bought books or DVDs from one of the men being investigated and didn’t receive the one-on-one training that investigators had suspected. In one case, a Washington lawyer was listed even though he’d never contacted the instructors. Dozens of others had wanted to pass a polygraph not for a job, but for a personal reason: The test was demanded by spouses who suspected infidelity.
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Photo Credit: APRep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, served Treasury Secretary Jack Lew with another subpoena relating to the IRS scandal in which the organization targeted Tea Party organizations, the committee announced on Friday.
This is the second subpoena Issa has served on Lew regarding the scandal. “Secretary Lew is responsible for providing all pertinent documents Treasury has in its possession, both within and outside the IRS,” Issa said in a statement. “The Committee is aware of responsive documents in Treasury’s possession that have not been produced to the Committee.”
In a press release, the House oversight committee detailed the committee’s and other House committees’ efforts to obtain documents from the IRS and the Treasury Department about the scandal—and how President Barack Obama’s administration has obfuscated and not complied with the House’s investigations and previous subpoena.
On June 13, Issa joined Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the chairman of the House oversight committee’s subcommittee on Economic Growth, Job Creation and Regulatory Affairs; Dave Camp, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; and Charles Boustany (R-LA), the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee’s subcommittee on oversight, to write to Lew to demand he produce nine categories of documents by June 27. On June 27, Issa’s committee notes in its release that the Treasury Department responded by producing “only 356 pages of documents, mostly letters from Member of Congress and drafts of congressional testimony.”
On Sept. 18, Issa and Jordan wrote to Lew to again demand compliance by Oct. 2 with the June letter’s request for nine categories of documents and made clear that the committee was prepared to use “compulsory process” (subpoenas) if Lew did not comply. On Oct. 2, the Treasury Department wrote to the committee and said it would not be able to meet the deadline due to the government shutdown. “As an accommodation to the Treasury Department, the Committee allowed an extension of time for a response,” Issa’s committee noted.
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Photo Credit: AP The Internal Revenue Service shared highly confidential tax information of several Tea Party groups in the IRS scandal with the Federal Election Commission, a clear violation of federal law, according to newly obtained emails.
The public watchdog group Judicial Watch told Secrets Thursday that it was former scandal boss Lois Lerner who shared the information on groups including the American Future Fund and the American Issues Project.
The emails obtained by Judicial Watch show that the IRS, which was considering the tax status of the groups, gave the FEC the tax returns of the groups, including income, expenditures and staff pay. The emails also revealed the exact working of the prying political questions the IRS wanted the groups to reveal, such as their goals and the requests for brochures and ads.
The information, sent via email, to the FEC came in response to the organization’s questions about whether the IRS had granted tax-exempt status to the Tea Party groups. It is unclear how the information the IRS sent was going to help the FEC, since the IRS hadn’t determined the tax status of the groups yet.
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Photo Credit: APThere’s no doubt congressional investigators have their hands full probing allegations the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative non-profit groups. But now a different IRS scandal — involving the chronic, ongoing, mind-bogglingly wasteful mismanagement of a popular tax credit program — demands Congress’s attention because it has taken on new importance with the arrival of Obamacare.
The program is the Earned Income Tax Credit, through which the federal government gives out between $60 billion and $70 billion to low-income working Americans each year. It’s known as a “refundable” tax credit, but it is basically a transfer payment, in which the IRS sends a check — perhaps even $5,000 every year — to workers who have little or no tax liability.
The problem is, the IRS does little to determine whether recipients actually qualify for the money. A recent report by the IRS inspector general says the agency has given out somewhere between $110 billion and $132 billion in improper Earned Income Tax Credit payments in the last decade. In that time period, between 21 and 30 percent of tax credit payments went to people who didn’t qualify for them.
That is bad enough. But what infuriates lawmakers is that the IRS refuses to do anything about it. Agency officials told the inspector general they couldn’t fix the problem because the tax credit program is very complicated, and also because they are afraid vigorous enforcement would discourage legitimately qualified recipients from applying for credits. And the IRS is not only not working to reduce improper payments, it is refusing to report those payments to Congress as required. The bottom line, in the words of inspector general Russell George: “The IRS is unlikely to achieve any significant reduction in Earned Income Tax Credit improper payments.”
Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has heard that before. “The IRS has repeatedly ignored the fraud and abuse in the Earned Income Tax Credit program, which has already cost Americans over $100 billion,” Camp said in a statement Monday. “Americans should be confident that their tax dollars are being used properly, but that confidence has been shattered by the blatant disregard this agency has shown for monitoring refundable tax credits and better protecting taxpayers.”
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Photo Credit: AP/Charles DharapakWhile the Treasury Department has continued its basic operations since the government “shutdown” last Tuesday–collecting tens of billions in taxes and spending even more–the Office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), which conducts audits and investigations of the IRS, and which uncovered the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups, has been “shut down.”
“As of October 7 at 8:30 am, due to the continued lapse in appropriated federal funding, TIGTA’s normal operations are shut down,” says the recorded message at an “emergency notification” phone line that the IG’s office set up for its workers. “Employees should’ve already received instructions to not report to work, and to not incur any work related expenses.”
“We anticipate full cessation of audits, inspections and evaluations during the shutdown period,” says a TIGTA document obtained by CNSNews.com. The document is entitled “Bureau Shutdown Plans During Periods of Lapsed Appropriations, September 2013.”
According to the document, in addition to ceasing audits, investigations and evaluations, TIGTA is also furloughing 61% of its staff.
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NOM is seeking damages from the disclosure, as well as to overturn a statute shielding the IRS from disclosing any information about the incident, according to a complaint filed by the Act Right Legal Foundation on behalf of NOM in the Eastern District of Virginia Thursday.
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) obtained the NOM’s 2008 tax returns in February 2012, which contained an unredacted list of donors, including presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
The president of the HRC became a national co-chair for the Obama reelection campaign in 2012 a day later.
NOM Chairman John Eastman said the group was able to remove redaction layers from the PDF documents that were leaked, showing that they came from within the IRS. The unauthorized disclosure of tax information is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
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TIGTA also found that “sensitive taxpayer information was inadvertently disclosed in response to nine (16.4 percent) of the FOIA/Privacy Act and four (7.4 percent) of the I.R.C. § 6103 information requests reviewed.”
“TIGTA reviewed a statistically valid sample of 55 FOIA/Privacy Act information requests from a population of 3,415 FOIA/Privacy Act requests and found nine (16.4 percent) in which taxpayer rights may have been violated because the IRS improperly withheld or failed to adequately search for and provide information to requestors,” the report, titled Fiscal Year 2013 Statutory Review of Compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, said.
The IRS hired 21 new disclosure specialists in Fiscal Year 2012 and 24 new specialists in 2011, TIGTA said.
“The influx of new employees may be a contributing factor to the increased instances of taxpayer information being either erroneously withheld or not provided in error,” TIGTA said.
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