IRS chief counsel’s office involved in targeting controversy

[Valin]

Washington Post:

Josh Hicks

July 17/13

 

The chief counsels office for the Internal Revenue Service, headed by a political appointee of President Obama, helped develop the agencys problematic guidelines for reviewing tea party cases, according to a top IRS attorney.

 

In interviews with congressional investigators, IRS lawyer Carter Hull said his superiors told him that the chief counsels office, led by William Wilkins, would need to review some of the first applications the agency screened for additional scrutiny because of potential political activity.

 

Previous accounts from IRS employees had shown that Washington IRS officials were involved in the controversy, but Hulls comments represent the closest connection to the White House to date. No evidence so far has definitively linked the White House to the agencys actions.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

The IRS Goes to Washington

New testimony links political vetting to orders from D.C.

7/17/13

 

We're starting to understand why Lois Lerner took the Fifth about her role in the IRS targeting of conservative groups. The testimony of at least three more employees in the IRS Washington office is now making clear that Ms. Lerner and other Washington IRS officials had a direct hand in slow rolling the tax-exempt applications of conservative groups in an election season.

 

The House Oversight Committee holds another hearing Thursday that will showcase some of these witnesses. According to Washington IRS tax law specialist Carter Hull, his supervisor Ronald Shoemaker and Manager of Exempt Organizations Technical Michael Seto, tea party applications were intentionally singled out for extra layers of review and put through an unusual process.

 

Mr. Hull told House investigators that normally his judgment about applications would have been enough to approve or deny their tax-exempt status. Instead of sending those applications through the normal channel, however, conservative applications were sent through Ms. Lerner's office for review, and also directed to the IRS chief counsel. That process was highly unusual and created a vetting system in which applications were interminably delayed.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

[Valin]

House Panel Scrutinizes IRS Inspector General Report

Rebekah Metzler

July 18, 2013

 

A top Democrat in the House of Representatives pressed the Treasury Department Inspector General responsible for the report that revealed the Internal Revenue Service had inappropriately scrutinized conservative political groups on whether the report deliberately left out evidence that some liberal groups had also been targeted during a hearing Thursday.

 

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee – one of several panels looking into the IRS controversy – has been sparring with Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the committee chairman over the findings of the investigation. Cummings claimed Russell George, the inspector general, may have purposefully left out keywords such as "progressive" that had been put on an IRS watch list alongside "tea party," "9/12" and "patriot," all of which were included in the report.

 

George used his opening statement to push back against the criticism and said Lois Lerner, an IRS official embroiled in the scandal, was to blame for the misconception that his report was biased.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZvyoVoXpdY

[Valin]

A Bombshell in the IRS Scandal

A higher office is implicated.

PEGGY NOONAN

7/18/13

 

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington officethat had been establishedbut to the office of the chief counsel.

 

That is a bombshellsuch a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn't say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed to be holding a filibuster on Pakistan.

 

Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency.

 

(Snip)

 

___________________________________________________________________________________

 

BTW SQUIRREL!!!

[clearvision]

About time for a new "scandal" I would say. It is Friday afternoon.

[Valin]

About time for a new "scandal" I would say. It is Friday afternoon.

What has the darn George Bush done now?

[Valin]

Name That Bureaucrat

The IRS scandal shows that those who make decisions must be held responsible.

John Fund

7/19/13

 

Finally, we may be getting somewhere in the IRS scandal involving the targeting and harassment of tea-party groups applying for tax exemptions. At Thursdays House Government Reform and Oversight hearing, some names were at last attached to some of the IRSs most questionable actions in the scandal.

 

Back in May, top IRS officials Steven Miller and Lois Lerner insisted that rogue agents in the Cincinnati office acted without direction from IRS headquarters in Washington. But Elizabeth Hofacre, who was the Cincinnati agent in charge of reviewing flagged tea-party applications, says she had no autonomy or authority to act on applications and so she simply sat on them. She blamed Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington, for the delays, saying that he directed her in how to treat problem cases but never gave her any feedback.

 

For his part, Hull said he had tried to tackle the growing pile of applications, but he was told they must first go through a multi-tier review that involved Lerners office and that of William Wilkins, the IRSs chief counsel. Wilkins, a political appointee of President Obamas, has been involved in Democratic politics as a staffer and campaign donor for over 30 years. Wilkinss office did not have its first meeting with IRS officials on the tea-party applications until August 2011; at that point the applications had been pending for so long that it was decided that the IRS needed to demand updated information from the tea-party groups, further slowing down the process. Hull says that the behavior of IRS management during this whole process was unusual.

 

(Snip)