Dozens of Tea Party Groups File Massive Lawsuit Against IRS. By Katherine Weber, Christian Post Reporter. | Thursday, May 30, 2013. The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) announced Wednesday that it has filed a federal lawsuit against the IRS on behalf of 25 Tea Party and conservative organizations regarding the government entity's recent scandal involving the …
Nov 21, 2016 · However, because the IRS had not yet acted on the Texas Patriots Tea Party’s application for tax-exempt status, NorCal brought suit against the IRS and asked the court to order the IRS to process the Texas Patriots Tea Party’s application for tax-exempt status. The IRS argued that the request for a preliminary injunction was unnecessary because the IRS has …
Dec 21, 2015 · WASHINGTON – A Washington advocacy group filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the IRS and top Obama administration officials on behalf of 25 Tea Party-related groups, marking the biggest lawsuit to...
Jan 11, 2019 · Disgraced former bureaucrat Lois Lerner led the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt groups. A 2013 inspector general’s report found the IRS had singled out conservative and tea...
Former Internal Revenue Service Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner is sworn in on May 22, 2013, before testifying to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for its investigation into allegations that the IRS targeted conservative nonprofit organizations. (Photo: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)
M.D. Kittle / January 11, 2019. Former Internal Revenue Service Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner is sworn in on May 22, 2013, before testifying to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for its investigation into allegations that the IRS targeted conservative nonprofit organizations.
Four days after the Justice Department closed its investigation, 19 members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee led by the Committee's Chairman, Jason Chaffetz (R- UT ), filed a resolution to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. Those sponsoring the impeachment resolution to remove Koskinen from office accused him of failing to prevent the destruction of evidence in allowing the erasure of back-up tapes containing thousands of e-mails written by Lois Lerner, and of making false statements under oath to Congress. In a statement released by the Committee, Chaffetz said Koskinen "failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled. Impeachment is the appropriate tool to restore public confidence in the IRS and to protect the institutional interests of Congress."
Beginning in March 2010, the IRS more closely scrutinized certain organizations applying for tax-exempt status under sections 501 (c) (3) and 501 (c) (4) of the Internal Revenue Code by focusing on groups with certain words in their names. In May 2010, some employees of the "Determinations Unit" of the Cincinnati office of the IRS, which is tasked with reviewing applications pertaining to tax-exempt status, began developing a spreadsheet that became known as the "Be On the Look Out" ("BOLO") list.
In October 2015, the Justice Department notified Congress that there would be no charges against the former IRS official Lois Lerner or against anyone else in the IRS. The investigation found no evidence of illegal activity or the partisan targeting of political groups and found that no IRS official attempted to obstruct justice. The DOJ investigation did find evidence of mismanagement and Lerner's poor judgement in using her IRS account for personal messages but said "...poor management is not a crime." In September 2017, the DOJ declined a request from the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means to reopen the investigation into Lerner's IRS activities.
Federal Election Commission, which overturned many previous restrictions on political campaign spending and allowed nearly unlimited and often anonymous spending by corporations and other groups to influence elections. Some Tea Party leaders began forming political action committees as offshoots of their 501 (c)-tax-exempt organizations. By late September 2010, tax-exempt non-profit groups had spent in excess of $100 million on the mid-term elections, more than double the expenditure from a similar point in the election cycle four years earlier.
On May 13, The Washington Post reported that Marcus Owens, head of the IRS department examining tax-exempt groups in 1990–1999, said that the IRS routinely categorized similar groups that sought the status of social welfare organizations.
Responding to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, Thomas Kane, Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel for the IRS, wrote in a sworn declaration that Lerner's Blackberry was "removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012." In a USA Today opinion column, James S. Robbins wrote, "For a scandal that is frequently derided as 'fake,' it is amazing how often real evidence disappears. The disappearing act is so frequent, it is reasonable to wonder whether it is really a systematic attempt to destroy evidence of abuse of power." An IRS IT official told the National Review that any personal folders containing Lerner's emails were unlikely to have been on the Blackberry as, if they had been, then IT employees "wouldn't have been jumping through all the hoops to recover data from [Lerner's crashed hard] drive" in June 2011.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that inappropriate criteria had been used by IRS personnel to select certain applications for tax exemption status for further review and that inappropriate procedures were applied against organizations based on their names or policy positions. According to the audit, beginning early in 2010, front-line IRS agents violated IRS policy by failing to handle tax matters in an impartial manner that would promote public confidence: