US Senate Report: IRS Approved ONE… Yes, Only ONE Conservative Group in Three Years

Lois LernerWhy isn’t anyone in the IRS in jail?

Americans for Tax Reform has found an almost unbelievable factoid in the extensive Senate Finance Committee report on the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service under Lois Lerner. Over a period of over three years, Lerner’s clearly anti-conservative IRS approved the non-profit status of exactly one conservative political advocacy group. That’s right, one.

Here’s the passage in the Senate report providing the egregiously biased results of Lerner’s agency:

Due to the circuitous process implemented by Lerner, only one conservative political advocacy organization was granted tax-exempt status between February 2009 and May 2012. Lerner’s bias against these applicants unquestionably led to these delays, and is particularly evident when compared to the IRS’s treatment of other applications, discussed immediately below.

ATR explains that around April or May of 2010, Lerner noticed the high number of conservative and Tea Party group’s applying for tax exempt status and, as the report says, promptly added “more layers of review and raised hurdles for applicants to clear.” ATR notes that Lerner’s “rigid and unorthodox process” resulted in conservative groups waiting “a total of 621 years for the IRS to make a decision about their applications for tax-exempt status.”

The report underscores that Lerner’s “rigid and unorthodox” process “unnecessarily” delayed Tea Party/conservative applicants while many progressives’ applications were processed “quickly”:

The unfortunate consequence of imposing this highly rigid and unorthodox process on EO Determinations was that many Tea Party applications that could have been decided in 2010 were not. Rather, those Tea Party applications unnecessarily languished for several more years, while the IRS mismanaged its way through a series of failed initiatives designed to bring the applications to decision.

Although applications from the Tea Party and conservative organizations languished at the IRS, this was not the case for all groups that applied. In cases where the IRS wanted to act quickly, it did – particularly for other high-profile applications that attracted political attention.

The bipartisan committee concluded that the way the IRS treated organizations was “almost universally consistent with Lerner’s personal political views – this is, supporting Democratic candidates and opposing conservative tax-exempt organizations that engaged in political speech.”

http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/senate-report-irs-approved-one-conservative-group-three-yrs

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