IRS employees were responsible for sabotaging the tax agency's nonpartisan mission in order to further President Obama's political goals, with one IRS employee calling a conservative group "icky" and another complaining about how they would probably "have to" approve tea party group applications for nonprofit status, the latest bombshell findings by the House Oversight Committee have revealed.
The new Republican-authored report, released by Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Tuesday, seeks to undercut the administration's explanations for the IRS's improper scrutiny of Tea Party and conservative groups, The Daily Caller reported.
"The IRS and its employees, whose conduct is largely shielded from public scrutiny to protect taxpayers, were not only affected by politics, but by a more basic human failure: a discriminatory outlook on the world," the staff report argues. "The IRS's inability to keep politics out of objective decisions about interpretation of the tax code damaged its primary function: an apolitical tax collector that Americans can trust to treat them fairly."
"Nearly four years after the committee began probing complaints about disparate treatment towards applicants for tax-exempt status, the committee's investigation is not closed," the report states, providing a status check on the investigation's findings and listing questions that still remain.
In May 2013, former IRS official Lois Lerner, in charge of the agency's tax-exempt division during 2010-2012, eventually revealed the targeting-scandal at an American Bar Association event, according to CNN.
"They used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title," she said at the time. "That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive and inappropriate."
The improper scrutiny, which lasted over two years, could have been stopped by as many as eight senior IRS officials, but instead, the tax agency was running under "bad judgment, inexperience, and bureaucratic rigidity."
Several major incidents where IRS officials specifically targeted tea party groups and misled the public about its secret political targeting program have been listed in the 226-page report, The Washington Times reported.
At a House Ways and Means subcommittee hearing held months before the 2012 presidential election, a top IRS official apparently considered going public with the agency's targeting of conservative groups before deciding against revealing the bombshell news.
"I am beginning to wonder whether I should do [the hearing] and affirmatively use it to put a stake in politics and c4," Steven Miller, then-Deputy Commissioner, wrote in a June 2012 email to his chief of staff Nikole Flax, with c4 being a reference to allegations about politics playing a role in the agency's denial of tax-exempt, 501(c)(4) status to conservative-leaning groups.
Even though Miller testified at a July 25 hearing, he never revealed his knowledge of the misconduct, according to Fox News. "Because he did not, he did a great disservice to the American taxpayers," the House oversight committee report states.
The report also criticizes the Justice Department for failing to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the improper scrutiny, and labels the Treasury Department as "the IRS's absentee parental agency."
"Congress created administrative oversight entities within the Executive Branch to ensure the IRS carries out its mission efficiently and responsibly," the report states. "These entities -- specifically, the IRS Oversight Board and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration -- exist to ensure that IRS misconduct does not occur and, if it does, to identify and address it immediately. In the case of the IRS's targeting of conservative tax-exempt applicants, these administrative oversight entities failed in their missions."
Other conclusions in the report, including several already made public, are that the Obama administration appears so far to have done an incomplete investigation and at times has been uncooperative, according to Politico.
"Only a month after Attorney General (Eric) Holder announced the administration's investigation, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller was unable to answer basic questions about the status," the report states. "Even as recently as July 2014, after the IRS informed Congress that it had destroyed two years of Lerner's e-mails, the FBI continued its refusal to provide any information about its investigation."
However, even though the report finds no evidence that Obama or White House officials ordered any special treatment of Tea Party groups, it does point to a "culture of bias against conservative organizations among certain IRS employees."
"Evidence shows an IRS responsive to the partisan policy objectives of the White House and an IRS leadership that coordinates with political appointees of the Obama administration," the report states.
"That bias underscores that the IRS is no longer the neutral tax collector it claims to be, at a time when its employees are tasked with implementing Obama's signature healthcare law," according to the GOP-led House committee report.
Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, criticized Issa for releasing the report to the media before giving it to the rest of the panel, The Hill reported.
"It is revealing that the Republicans - yet again - are leaking cherry-picked excerpts of documents to support their preconceived political narrative without allowing committee members to even see their conclusions or vote on them first," Cummings said in a statement on Monday.
"By leaking information to reporters on condition that they not disclose it to Democrats, Republicans are intentionally bypassing the normal congressional vetting process designed to distinguish fact from fiction."
Meanwhile, the Oversight Committee will continue its probe into the IRS's handling of applications since it was unable to come to a conclusion about whether the White House knew about the targeting beforehand.
