Many people hate the IRS. Nothing gives people the sweats like an envelope with the IRS as the return address. Groans, fear and a fleeting temptation to not open the letter overcome by (hopefully) good sense.
The GOP thinks they're on to something with the IRS targeting the Tea Party. It is a good ploy, but the regular guy standing in line at Starbucks is bemused. The IRS behaving badly? That's old news. Democratic members of Congress and pundits alike are squirming. "This situation is outrageous" and it is outrageous, but I don't know anyone who doesn't think the IRS is the pit bull of the government. Like I said, old news.
The story that it was the IRS that brought down Al Capone was a "good" thing, wasn't it? Taking a thug off the streets is a good idea. That action set a course for the IRS that continues today. When all else fails, sic the IRS on 'em. To hear Darrell Issa cry his crocodile tears over the IRS behaving thuggishly rings false. The lady behind the guy standing in the Starbucks line snorts in derision. She wants a little less talk and a lot more action, you see the IRS forced her to sell her house to pay off her IRS obligations. To her, the IRS "investigation" is a bunch of blather. The GOP is upset that their pet 501(c)4 organizations were inconvenienced, but no one gives a crap about the IRS standard operating procedures for anything else. To anyone who's been targeted by the IRS, Issa is looking for sweepings under the wrong rug.
Ask Wesley Snipes if the IRS doesn't have a bite to them. Snipes served just under 3 years for misdemeanor convictions of failing to file a tax return. Tax related prosecutions went up in 2012. That's a "good" thing right? Everyone should pay their fair share? What is your fair share? The problem is, your "fair share" is determined by the IRS if you are audited. The issue has always been that the IRS is perceived to be impossible to fight. Fight and they will counter your every move with something worse. They can tie you in knots. Triggering a fear of the IRS isn't difficult to do. Believing the IRS plays "fair" is a pipe dream.
Shelley Davis a former Air Force historian went to the IRS to serve as a historian there. She left in disgust, her career was in shambles. Her error? Documenting IRS history "warts and all". The IRS wasn't interested in people knowing their warts.
When Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act 31 years ago, our lawmakers stated clearly that the business of government was our business, and we have a right to know how that business is conducted. The IRS has never operated on that principle, but its arrogance became even more entrenched after the abuses of power committed by the Nixon administration.(emphasis added)In one of the Watergate era's great perversities--you might call it a tragic irony--the IRS has twisted regulations designed to protect taxpayers from political harassment into a virtually unassailable shield against its own accountability.
The culture of the service also rests on the self-serving hypothesis that criticism of the agency will corrupt its noble mission by eroding taxpayer confidence and threatening voluntary compliance with the tax laws. Kafka, in his best fantasy, could not have devised a better justification for organizational intransigence and rot.
It's this fear of the IRS that the GOP is seizing upon to make hay with the low information voter. The problem is that to the cynical average Joe, the IRS has always been a political tool and this latest rendition of the IRS gone wild is no exception to the perception. We've heard this before. When the big guy in the White House is Republican, the IRS goes after Democrats and vice versa? Well, then, the IRS goes vice versa too.
The real scandal about the IRS is that this is an opportunity to correct IRS abuses that both parties are more than willing to allow to slip through their fingers. It's a neat trick to trigger a "random" audit upon your frenemies. The real solution would be to expand the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 to set clear guidelines about what "random" means when it comes to audits. How about establishing boundaries of how the IRS pursues their cases? How about simply requiring the IRS to state their procedures for all that they do?
I find it appalling that one of the only people to go to jail over the mortgage bubble is not a bankster but a home owner, Charlie Engle, a former addict who turned his life around and became an ultra marathoner. Engle was featured in the 2008 documentary, “Running the Sahara”. IRS Special Agent Robert W. Nordlander, saw the documentary and wondered how Engle made a living while training like he did to run marathons. Based upon what he saw in the documentary, Nordlander started a criminal tax law investigation into Charlie Engle. No evidence. Just a curiosity to answer the question, "How can he afford this?" was enough to start an investigation. No presumed right to privacy, after all Engle was featured in a documentary. I can't be the only one who finds this story chilling.
(He [Norlander] also told the grand jurors that sometimes, when he sees somebody driving a Ferrari, he’ll check to see if they make enough money to afford it. When I called Mr. Nordlander and others at the I.R.S. to ask whether this was an appropriate way to choose subjects for criminal tax investigations, my questions were met with a stone wall of silence.)Please note, Charlie Engle was not charged with any tax fraud. He was charged with mortgage fraud and that is NOT an IRS concern. When you investigate the "confession" it's more of an indictment of his mortgage broker. He came under IRS purview simply as a result of being featured in a documentary. The Special Agent researches possible tax cases simply because people drive Ferrari's. I think if there's a there, there; it's in the IRS' Special Agent's confession that he considers it his duty to investigate tax payers on the basis of the most capricious and arbitrary criteria imaginable. How many other IRS Agents use similar criteria?Mr. Engle’s tax records showed that while his actual income was substantial, his taxable income was quite small, in part because he had a large tax-loss carry forward, due to a business deal he’d been involved in several years earlier. (Mr. Nordlander would later inform the grand jury only of his much lower taxable income, which made it seem more suspicious.) Still convinced that Mr. Engle must be hiding income, Mr. Nordlander did undercover surveillance and took “Dumpster dives” into Mr. Engle’s garbage. He mainly discovered that Mr. Engle lived modestly.
In March 2009, still unsatisfied, Mr. Nordlander persuaded his superiors to send an attractive female undercover agent, Ellen Burrows, to meet Mr. Engle and see if she could get him to say something incriminating. In the course of several flirtatious encounters, she asked him about his investments.
After acknowledging that he had been speculating in real estate during the bubble to help support his running, he said, according to Mr. Nordlander’s grand jury testimony, “I had a couple of good liar loans out there, you know, which my mortgage broker didn’t mind writing down, you know, that I was making four hundred thousand grand a year when he knew I wasn’t.”
Mr. Engle added, “Everybody was doing it because it was simply the way it was done. That doesn’t make me proud of the fact that I am at least a small part of the problem.”
Unbeknownst to Mr. Engle, Ms. Burrows was wearing a wire.
Back to the IRS Tea Party "investigation, is it any wonder that the IRS would use speculation and supposition in how they viewed 501(c)4 applications? In a word, no. I didn't need a Congressional hearing to figure that out. All I had to do was snoop around the internet and read how the IRS treats anyone that triggers their interest. Darrell Issa is focusing on looking under the wrong shell in the game, but he's not likely to figure that out - it would lead to taking real action that would help real people.