Tax Day Reminder: IRS targeting scandal is alive and well

The numbers are staggering.

On Tax Day, some 150-million individual tax returns are expected to be filed. Americans will spend more than six billion hours preparing their tax forms.

Newly released emails reveal that Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit, warned other IRS officials that lower-level employees “are not as sensitive as we are to the fact that anything we write can be public--or at least be seen by Congress.”

Consider this: the biggest issue facing American taxpayers – the complexity of the tax code. The tax code includes more than four million words and has been changed five thousand times since 2001.

Newly released emails reveal that Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit, warned other IRS officials that lower-level employees “are not as sensitive as we are to the fact that anything we write can be public--or at least be seen by Congress.”

We have an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that is increasingly inaccessible. According to one study, 60% of calls made to the IRS were never answered. And if you did get through, you experienced lengthy wait times.

This Tax Day, we have an IRS that’s out of touch with America – an IRS that continues to exhibit an unbridled arrogance – an IRS that’s still discriminating against conservative and Tea Party groups.

For years now, we have been engaged in a federal lawsuit challenging an unlawful and unconstitutional targeting scheme by the IRS – an IRS that singled out conservative and Tea Party groups because of their political beliefs – an IRS that has delayed action on their applications – keeping these groups on the sideline during a critical election.

One of our clients, Rick Harbaugh of the Albuquerque, New Mexico Tea Party, has been waiting for more than five years for the IRS to make a determination on its application for creating a tax-exempt organization.

“Most people, when they apply for a 501(c) (4) status, they receive the designation within a few months,” said Harbaugh. “The IRS reviews the information and makes a determination. With us, they are still making a determination on documents we sent them 2 or 3 years ago. We have sent them well over 1,000 pages of information that they have requested. This is outrageous.”

“It’s very frustrating for the people who have been waiting five years for this and keep sending requests for information and being told that they will let us know when a decision has been made,” Harbaugh added.

The five year wait for the Albuquerque Tea Party comes despite new assertions just weeks ago by the IRS Commissioner who claimed the massive backlog of cases pending has been cleared up and that “our inventory of applications is now current.”

That’s just plain false.

As Harbaugh put it: “As far as waiting five years, there is no justification for it. I get very tired from people telling me that the problem has been resolved and the issues have been taken care of. Well, the issues have not been taken care of and the problem has not been resolved.”

And on this Tax Day, there’s fresh evidence that the former top IRS official at the center of this scandal was well aware that the content of emails could generate unwanted attention.

Newly released emails reveal that Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit, warned other IRS officials that lower-level employees “are not as sensitive as we are to the fact that anything we write can be public--or at least be seen by Congress.”

The revelations coming now – more than three years after the fact – in news reports:

In the latest batch of documents the IRS released to Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which the agency heavily redacted before handing over, Lerner proposed training to help IRS employees “understand the pitfalls” of discussing “specific Congress people, practitioners and political parties” in emails that could be "seen by Congress" or the public.

“We are all a bit concerned about the mention of specific Congress people, practitioners and political parties. Our filed folks are not as sensitive as we are to the fact that anything we write can be public--or at least be seen by Congress,” Lerner wrote in an email to Holly Paz, former director of the IRS Office of Rulings and Agreements, on Feb. 16, 2012.

No one should really be surprised by Lerner’s warning to employees. After all, as I reported earlier this month, Lerner and the Department of Justice (DOJ) teamed up to attempt to fabricate criminal prosecutions of conservatives – prosecutions that could have ended in jail time.

And no one should be surprised that the DOJ – which is fully involved in the IRS targeting scheme – decided it will not pursue criminal contempt charges against Lerner.

On this Tax Day, as Americans deal with arguably the most feared and most corrupt bureaucracy, it’s important to remember – the Obama Administration and the IRS have done nothing to hold accountable those responsible for this massive unlawful targeting scheme.

As our client from New Mexico – who has been waiting half a decade for an IRS determination – puts it: “This is not fair and it’s illegal.”