The Washington Post has the article Lois Lerner: ‘I have not done anything wrong’
At a hearing of the House Oversight Committee Wednesday, IRS Director of exempt organizations Lois Lerner invoked her fifth amendment rights, saying she was innocent of any wrong doing.
Some comments on this article suggested firing people from the top on down.
If we are going to fire people from the top down, how about going after the Congress people who have cut $1billion from the IRS budget, then complain that the IRS is responding too slowly, then get all huffy when some people in the agency try to take shortcuts to catch up on the backlog.
The Republican fairness as far as the IRS is concerned also means that the IRS should spend equal amounts of time going over the tax returns of people earning $20,000 a year and the people and corporations earning $1,000,000,000 a year. This is the Republic method of running the IRS like a private corporation. Do all Republican private corporations spend their resources equally on places where they are likely to reap profits and places where they are unlikely to reap profits?
If you want to catch the most tax fraud for your auditing dollars, you go after the places with the highest possible tax responsibility. Especially places that earn big bucks, but pay no taxes. You might also look at organizations that are obviously political, but are claiming social welfare exemptions.
The auditors used search terms including “Tea Party” to find likely applications to concentrate on. If these and other conservative political organization related terms were the only ones they used, then this might be a scandal. Since they also investigated and denied exemption to liberal groups too, it seems unlikely that there was a political motivation here. Since Congress passed laws that said Social Welfare groups claiming tax exempt status could also do some politics, but not too much, did they expect the IRS to process these applications without asking if there were too much political activity?
So the Republican investigators of the IRS have some suspicions. When they have proof of something, then I will start to listen. Until then, it just looks like a witch hunt to me.