The headlines were filled this morning with accusations, defenses, and more about the scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service’s increased, targeted scrutiny of the applications of specific tax-exempt organizations.
Details about what actually happened – and who knew what and when – are still murky. An investigation into the timeline and the players in the scandal is ongoing. The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) was instructed to dig deeper and the Attorney General’s office also ordered the FBI to investigate.
When the matter was made public last week, the IRS acknowledged that mistakes were made and issued an apology (whether or not it was enough is another story). Last night, the IRS released the following statement:
The IRS welcomes the public release of the Treasury Inspector General’s report. The IRS agrees that aspects of the original approach for handling the influx of tax-exempt applications were inappropriate, but it is important to clarify a few points.
The IRS is required by law to determine if organizations are engaging in a legally permissible level of political activity. Centralizing these cases was necessary to achieve consistent treatment. After seeing issues with particular cases, inappropriate shortcuts were used to determine which cases may be engaging in political activities. It is important to note that the vast majority of these cases would still have been centralized based on the general criteria used for other cases. All centralized cases –including the minority of those with the specified names — received similar treatment in which the facts and circumstances of each case determined the ultimate outcome. It is also important to understand that the group of centralized cases included organizations of all political views.
While flaws in our process were corrected last year based on our own review, we only recently discussed this publicly as there had been a concurrent ongoing TIGTA audit of the situation. There was no intent to hide this issue, but rather we waited until TIGTA completed their fact finding, made recommendations, and we reviewed their findings.
I will keep you posted as more information – real information, not just fake, teaser headlines – becomes available.
