A government investigation report suggests that the IRS under former President Barack Obama targeted left-leaning non-profits in addition to conservative ones, according to an audit released Thursday.
The IRS targeting scandal plagued the Obama administration after revelations that the IRS may have denied tax-exempt status to certain conservative groups based on the name of the organization.
Targeting of political organizations may have been conducted using as many as 259 political keywords, and there’s evidence of potential targeting by the IRS dating back to 2004, the investigation found. A previous report from 2013 found that 96 groups were selected for review based on the terms like “Tea Party” and “Patriot.”
The new report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) report found that the IRS potentially selected 146 cases for review based on a politically charged name. The audit covered 17 political terms like “Green Energy,” “Occupy,” “Progressive,” “Rally Patriots,” and “ACORN Successors,” referring to the Association for Communities Organizing for Reform Now that disbanded after allegations of voter fraud and tax evasion. Many ACORN subchapters tried to reform after the national organization disbanded, and the IRS apparently was on the lookout for new groups.
Some of the search terms used to review cases were redacted in the report.
Of the 146 cases, TIGTA determined that 83 cases were processed using political selection criteria. The other 63 cases were reviewed when the criteria was in effect, though TIGTA could not determine whether the organizations were selected because they contained political words and messages.
Most of the cases of political targeting TIGTA investigated occurred between 2009 and 2012, but TIGTA also reviewed cases stretching back to 2004. For example, the review team at IRS added the term “progressive” to its “Touch and go” list for reviewing tax-exempt organizations in 2008, directing employees to watch for activities that “appear to lean toward a new political party” and “are partisan and appear as anti-Republican.” The criterion was added to the “Be on the Lookout” list in 2010, but TIGTA said it could not find documentation supporting whether organizations were denied non-profit status based on that criterion.
TIGTA found 16 cases that the IRS denied non-profit status to for dealing with “Healthcare Legislation” starting in 2010, as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act known as Obamacare was being debated in Congress. The IRS prevented one unidentified non-profit organization from gaining tax-exempt status for political reasons, and the others were barred from the tax break for lobbying and advocating on a specific piece of legislation.
The IRS has “completely revamped the process for reviewing tax-exempt applications,” and TIGTA did not make any new recommendations for the agency.
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