IRS: More than Boy Who Cried Wolf?

Amidst all the end-of-school and family activity we’ve had this past month, I’ve been following the IRS “scandal” with interest. I can’t help thinking Tea Party conservatives are a lot like the boy who cried wolf.

“Why?” you may ask if you’re outraged the Internal Revenue Service would investigate new conservative non-profit social welfare agencies.

Call me skeptical, but knowing how often groups and individuals massage their tax reporting to minimize payments, I suspect some of these groups have overstepped the boundaries.

Second, and more importantly, IRS staff was wrestling with new, unclear regulations for social welfare non-profits in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling without enough guidance. This ruling allowed corporations and organizations, including non-profits, to engage in electioneering communications. Unfortunately, cuts to the IRS, like other federal agencies, have made proper management and enforcement difficult. (This is part of our current “all cuts, no spending” Congress. I can only chuckle at the irony of our government officials cutting the one agency responsible for bringing revenue into the government. But I digress . . .)

Conservative groups brought the Citizens United lawsuit, so we shouldn’t be surprised that most of the groups under IRS scrutiny were conservative. Robert Maguire on OpenSecrets.org writes: “Of the 21 organizations that received rulings from the IRS after January 1, 2010, and filed FEC reports in 2010 or 2012, 13 were conservative. They outspent the liberal groups in that category by a factor of nearly 34-to-1, the Center for Responsive Politics analysis shows.” I think the media, as they often do, jumped the gun on this story and missed that fact.

So in an update to the story, the New York Times reported on May 26: “But a close examination of these groups and others reveals an array of election activities that tax experts and former I.R.S. officials said would provide a legitimate basis for flagging them for closer review.

“Money is not the only thing that matters,” said Donald B. Tobin, a former lawyer with the Justice Department’s tax division who is a law professor at Ohio State University. “While some of the I.R.S. questions may have been overbroad, you can look at some of these groups and understand why these questions were being asked.”

And in another irony noted by Salon Magazine Editor at Large Joan Walsh, “We knew from the beginning of the IRS mess that the only group actually denied tax-exempt status was the Maine chapter of a Democratic women’s group, Emerge America.”

As Walsh concluded: “The IRS mess is coming to look more like the Benghazi ‘scandal’: a diversion from the genuine policy questions at issue, concocted to embarrass the president.”

I suspect if enough scrutiny is placed on the conservative groups crying wolf about IRS overreach, we may come to find out they are actually the ones breaking the law. And like the boy who cried wolf, they may have outsmarted themselves.