More hearings will be happening this week about the IRS Scandal. "The IRS Scandal Just Got Bigger" Conservative groups, whose applications were already approved faced long and illegal audits, according to the leaders of several groups. In particular, the Leadership Institute and the Claire Booth Luce Policy Institutes have complained about improper audits conducted by the IRS. The IRS has routinely audited tax exempt groups in a process that can take from a few weeks to a couple of months, to make sure they are complying with the law. However, the audits conducted by the IRS against the Leadership institute drug on for 2 years, in which the LI was required to file 23,000 pages of documents, costing them fifty thousand dollar. They were asked to provide a list of donors and the amount they contributed which is a violation of both IRS policy and US law. The audit of the Claire Booth Luce Policy Institute, also claim they were improperly audited and they spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to comply with the IRS audit. They were asked improper questions, such as where did their interns go to work after leaving the institute. Most companies do not keep track of former employees. The timing of these audits are also suspect in that they came at the same time that the rules for the Tea Party applications were redefined and made more difficult in July of 2012. On the 23rd, William Wilkins, an Obama nominee, met at the White House for over 5 hours, with Obama and 11 others. The following day, Doug Shulman, the head of the IRS had a meeting with Jeffrey Zients, who was acting head of the OMB. (Office of Management and Budget) That meeting lasted over 7 hours. The following day, the IRS employees were given new standards to apply to conservative applications. Zients left the country just days before the IG released his report in April and has not returned and is out of the reach of a congressional subpeona. Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, told Fox News Sunday that although there were problems at the IRS, they did not target conservative groups and that liberal groups were singled out too. Lew refused to address the fact that 298 Tea Party applications were held up, while all but three liberal applications were approved. examiner/article/the-irs-scandal-just-got-bigger
Posted on: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 21:01:11 +0000
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