Tea party beats
IRS in federal court, Judges demand tax
agency release secret target list immediately
WASHINGTON – A federal
appeals court Tuesday accused the Internal Revenue Service of stonewalling the
release of lists of tax-exempt organizations targeted for political scrutiny,
scolding the tax agency for compounding an offense by continuing to fight
disclosure.
The judges ordered the
IRS to quickly turn over the full list of groups it targeted so that a
class-action lawsuit, filed by the NorCal Tea Party Patriots, can proceed. The
judges also accused the Justice Department lawyers, who are representing the
IRS in the case, of acting in bad faith and compounding its violation of the
law in the first place.
“Among the most serious
allegations a federal court can address are that an executive agency has
targeted citizens for mistreatment based on their political views,” wrote Judge
Raymond M. Kethledge in a unanimous decision. “No citizen — Republican or
Democrat, socialist or libertarian — should be targeted or even have to fear
being targeted on those grounds. Yet those are the grounds on which the
plaintiffs allege they were mistreated by the IRS here. The allegations are
substantial: most are drawn from findings made by the Treasury Department’s own
inspector general for tax administration. Those findings include that the IRS
used political criteria to round up applications for tax-exempt status filed by
so-called tea-party groups; that the IRS often took four times as long to
process tea-party applications as other applications; and that the IRS served
tea-party applicants with crushing demands for what the Inspector General
called “unnecessary information.”
The case stems from the
IRS’ decision in 2010 to begin subjecting tea party and conservative groups to
intrusive scrutiny when they applied for nonprofit status.
The IRS has issued an
apology, blaming mistakes by low-level employees. Yet it fought for more than
five years demands for full disclosure and documents sought by tea party
groups.
Kethledge wrote in his
opinion that the IRS’ conduct since the original offense has “only compounded
the conduct” that gave rise to complaint in the first place.
“The lawsuit has
progressed as slowly as the underlying applications themselves: at every turn
the IRS has resisted the plaintiffs’ requests for information regarding the
IRS’s treatment of the plaintiff class, eventually to the open frustration of
the district court,” wrote Kethledge. “At issue here are IRS ‘Be On the Lookout’
lists of organizations allegedly targeted for unfavorable treatment because of
their political beliefs. Those organizations in turn make up the plaintiff
class. The district court ordered production of those lists, and did so again
over an IRS motion to reconsider. Yet, almost a year later, the IRS still has
not complied with the court’s orders. Instead the IRS now seeks from this court
a writ of mandamus, an extraordinary remedy reserved to correct only the
clearest abuses of power by a district court. We deny the petition.”
The court wrote in some
detail about IRS selective and intrusive demands for information from the
aggrieved groups.
“In 2010, the IRS began
to pay unusual attention to 501(c) applications from groups with certain
political affiliations,” Kethledge wrote. “As found by the inspector general,
the IRS ‘developed and used inappropriate criteria to identify applications
from organizations with ‘Tea Party’ in their names. … As to the policy
positions, the IRS gave heightened scrutiny to organizations concerned with
‘government spending, government debt or taxes,’ lobbying to ‘make America a better
place to live or ‘criticizing how the country is being run.'”
The court found the IRS
kept this inappropriate criteria in place for more than 18 months and that when
applications were wrongly flagged they were passed on to a team of specialists
where applicants “experienced significant delays and requests for unnecessary
information,” according to the IRS’ own inspector general.
While the standard time
for processing applications was 1221 days in 2012, “the average time a
potential political case … was open as of December 17, 2012, was 574 calendar,”
while some cases dragged on for four years. The Justice Department
declined to comment on the decision.
http://www.wnd.com/2016/03/tea-party-beats-irs-in-federal-court/
No comments:
Post a Comment