NEW YORK TIMES: During the summer of 2010, the dozen or so accountants and tax agents of Group 7822 of the Internal Revenue Service office in Cincinnati got a directive from their manager. A growing number of organizations identifying themselves as part of the Tea Party had begun applying for tax exemptions, the manager said, advising the workers to be on the lookout for them and other groups planning to get involved in elections.
The specialists, hunched over laptops on the office’s fourth floor, rarely discussed politics, one former supervisor said. Low-level employees in what many in the I.R.S. consider a backwater, they processed thousands of applications a year, mostly from charities like private schools or hospitals.
For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words like “patriots,” “we the people” — as a way to search efficiently through the flood of applications for groups that might not quality for exemptions, according to the I.R.S. inspector general. “Triage,” the agency’s acting chief described it… (more)
One day Obama tells students they have nothing to fear from big government and this happens. Imagine, some bureaucrat in the bowels of the government can cause all of this and there is little or nothing we can do about it.
Some are reporting the responsible manager got a $113,000 bonus to boot.
EDITOR: Ask CitiBank or Morgan Stanley if you don’t believe glitches occur in all large enterprises.
A dozen or so accountants do not constitute a “large enterprise”. If anything, a group that small should be nimble and efficient. The manager wanted to injure conservative groups and the manager got what she wanted. Has Newlanc not read some of the questionaires submitted to those groups? Does Newslanc agree with the IRS actions?
EDITOR: Has the contributor carefully read the New York Times article? Does the read believe that perhaps the largest bureacracy in the world will not occasionally have underlings who make mistakes?
NewsLanc neither keeps a list of contributors or retains a copy of the correspondence.
However, computer hard drives can be read. In the unlikely occasion of a government subpoena, we would need to consult with counsel before determining a course of action.
Incidentally, we ran into analogous situations concerning the operations of apartment complexes and hotels. When police sought information about the whereabouts of a suspected murderer, we fully cooperated. When the Feds sought to contnuously monitor who were the guests at one of our hotels, we declined to cooperate.