Tag: irs

House Oversight Committee: IRS’s Lois Lerner lied to us, you know.

OK, this just sounds like straight-up perjury:

[The House Oversight committee report] states that [former IRS overseer Lois] Lerner made false statements to committee staff on various occasions.

During a February 2012 briefing, Lerner told committee staff that the criteria for evaluating tax-exempt applications had not changed. According to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), however, Lerner directed in June 2011 that the criteria used to identify applications be changed.

Continue reading House Oversight Committee: IRS’s Lois Lerner lied to us, you know.

Well, well, well: Lois Lerner to testify to Congress after all. #irs [UPDATE: Or possibly not.]

Gee, I wonder why.

Former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner, a central figure in the IRS scandal, will appear before Congress Wednesday after refusing to testify last year on the matter, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said Sunday.

[snip]

Issa said he didn’t know why Lerner’s lawyers changed their mind, but suggested Lerner testifying was “in her best interest,” considering the recent evidence the committee had gathered.

Continue reading Well, well, well: Lois Lerner to testify to Congress after all. #irs [UPDATE: Or possibly not.]

Dueling narratives on individual mandate tax enforcement. #obamacare

Shot (December 2013):

Despite his administration’s quiet move overnight to ease the individual mandate for some Americans, President Obama said today the requirement will “absolutely” be enforced starting April 1, 2014, when everyone must have health insurance or pay a fine.

Speaking at an end-of-year news conference, the president insisted that there will be no delay of the mandate as some Republicans have repeatedly called for.

Chaser (February 2014):

…it’s not clear that the IRS will deploy much in the way of resources to aggressively search for individuals who don’t get coverage this first year. Enforcement of the individual mandate likely will be a huge challenge for the agency, both because of the difficulties in figuring out who doesn’t have insurance and the political problems it would pose for the Obama administration.

“I’d be very surprised if there’s much in the way of enforcement. It just doesn’t seem plausible,” said Federal Policy Group Managing Director Ken Kies, a former top congressional aide. “The IRS is in a tough spot. They don’t have the resources to do this. This is a whole different responsibility for them they never had before.”

Continue reading Dueling narratives on individual mandate tax enforcement. #obamacare

Consumer Reports volunteers for an IRS audit. #obamacare.

Advice like this will do them no favors:

Continue reading Consumer Reports volunteers for an IRS audit. #obamacare.

American public: IRS guilty as sin, but protected by @barackobama.

A fish rots from the head down.

If I was a Democratic operative, I’d be worrying like the blazes about these numbers:

A new Rasmussen Reports poll found 53 percent of likely U.S. voters believe the IRS broke the law when it targeted tea party and other conservative groups, while only 24 percent disagree.

But only 17 percent believe it is even somewhat likely that criminal charges will be brought against any government employees for IRS’s targeting of these groups. Seventy-four percent consider criminal charges unlikely. This number includes 27 percent who say charges are not at all likely.

Continue reading American public: IRS guilty as sin, but protected by @barackobama.

Rep. David Camp is annoying the IRS employee union.

First off, yes, I know: “IRS employee union” are three words that should never, ever have been allowed to form a coherent phrase in English in the first place.  So stipulated; but it happened.  So at least be comforted by the thought that representatives of such an affront to good sense are unhappy at the threat of making the federal government use the same exchange system as everybody else*.

IRS employees have a prominent role in Obamacare, but their union wants no part of the law.

National Taxpayer Employee Union officials are urging members to write their congressional representatives in opposition to receiving coverage through President Obama’s health care law.

The union leaders are providing members with a form letter to send to the congressmen that says “I am very concerned about legislation that has been introduced by Congressman Dave Camp to push federal employees out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and into the insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act.”

Continue reading Rep. David Camp is annoying the IRS employee union.

IRS rank-and-file STILL not getting it?

The first step in fixing a problem is to admit that you have one*.

Oh, pity this poor, poor, put-upon Cincinnati office anonymous IRS lawyer. S/he wrote in to Robert Anderson’s Witnesseth blog after Anderson noted that campaign contributions among IRS lawyers skewed heavily towards Democrats (government lawyers in general do, really).  After complaining a bit about that awful Republican party, and its hostility towards government lawyers, the government lawyer finished up:

…if there is a lack of political diversity among federal government attorneys, it can be attributed almost entirely to the Republican Party agenda.  That agenda makes me, and other federal government attorneys, very uneasy.

Hey!  You know what makes me uneasy?  IRS lawyers who go around and deliberately target conservative groups and individuals in order to further a partisan agenda that originated in Washington, DC.  Guess which one of us has a trail of evidence justifying said unease. Continue reading IRS rank-and-file STILL not getting it?

Chicago Tribune calls for Special Prosecutor in IRS scandal.

And Barack Obama’s hometown paper doesn’t exactly sound very pleased about the situation, either:

We can only speculate on which tools will unlock the grimy secrets of this egregious misuse of government authority. An ongoing self-examination by the IRS is laughably untrustworthy. The U.S. Department of Justice also is on the case.

But as we wrote May 23, many Americans won’t be much interested in what one arm of the Obama administration concludes about the conduct of other arms — the IRS, the Treasury and possibly the White House. There are times when only a special prosecutor has the independence and credibility to resolve such a politically fraught matter.

Needless to say, the administration has the same problem with special prosecutors and independent investigations and that sort of thing that every other Presidential administration has had; to wit, such activities have the pernicious (to them, and their party’s partisans) effect of causing new and exciting headaches for the party that holds the Oval Office.  Alas, the Executive Branch* should have thought of that before it started going after conservative nonprofit groups.

Moe Lane

*Note the precise proper nouns used. Barack Obama would have to have been very stupid indeed to have had any direct link to any of that…

*Other* QotD, I Almost Admire The IRS’s Chutzpah edition.

You have got to be kidding me:

New IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel appeared on his 34th day on the job to brief the [House Ways and Means] committee on his review of the agency’s activities, but he didn’t add much to the conversation — other than asking for a bigger budget, which prompted scorn from Paul Ryan.

I’m surprised Congressman Ryan didn’t throw his dry eraser at Werfel’s head.  I mean, that was just stupid of the new commissioner.  And if Werfel thinks that he’s having a bad day now, just wait until 2014 when he’s suddenly the scapegoat for every bad thing that happens with Obamacare’s implementation – which is to say, everything about Obamacare’s implementation.

I’d feel bad about that, except that nobody made him take the job.

For the record: I do not like @RepDuckworth very much.

But DAMN.

Rep. Tammy Duckworth, for the record, is a combat veteran who lost both feet (and most of the use of her arm) to enemy action. Braulio Castillo is a reported crony capitalist who allegedly used his IRS buddy to get a half-billion dollar contract. Castillo also apparently used a prep school foot injury to claim disabled veteran status, which is why Duckworth was using the rhetorical equivalent of an autopsy saw on him like that. Continue reading For the record: I do not like @RepDuckworth very much.