Should the IRS take a lesson from Ohio's Boards of Election?

This post went up yesterday at Ohio Watchdog:


The recent scandal of the IRS targeting conservative, tea party and patriot groups for unreasonable and ridiculous scrutiny in their tax-exempt applications, has renewed calls for abolishing the behemoth structure.

I'm all for that, but don't think it will ever happen. There just isn't the political will to eliminate the agency that implements the special favors and deductions created by politicians through a complicated, unknowable tax code.

Efforts to implement a flat tax or fair tax - where every person pays the same percentage of tax regardless of income - have also failed...so far. A major obstacle seems to be that poorer individuals would end up paying more than they do now and richer individuals wouldn't pay 'enough' - though 'enough' is never actually defined.

So absent its complete elimination, what can be done to ensure such targeting doesn't happen again - regardless of who the target might be?

The solution isn't easy, because the problem in inherent in the structure and culture of the agency - and government in general, as Monty at Ace of Spades explains:

The IRS is not supposed to be a partisan agency. The federal bureaucracy was explicitly designed to be non-partisan so that it would impartially enforce the tax laws and regulations passed by the Congress and approved by the Executive. But the IRS like many other federal bureaucracies tends to be staffed by people -- especially at the management level -- who believe in robust, activist government. In other words: it is staffed mainly by Democrats. And however nonpartisan the organization is supposed to be, it cannot help but reflect the culture of the people who comprise it. The IRS, being led by and staffed with activist-minded Democrats, cannot help but reflect that worldview. The culture reinforces itself because adherence to the culture is the only way to move up. Dissenters and contrarians do not last long in an organization like the IRS (any more than they do at the FBI or EPA or DoJ).

It's no surprise to hear that Lois Lerner's husband is a high-priced lawyer with an affinity for liberal activism. It's no surprise that Douglas Shulman's wife heads a liberal group dedicated to campaign finance reform. You'll find the same pattern repeated throughout the organization, no doubt. Like seeks out like. The culture reinforces itself. Everybody's kids go to the same schools, everybody knows everybody else's first name, and no one has to discuss politics because it's simply understood. The same thing happens at college campuses. Liberal politics, statism, the primacy of the regulatory state: it's just the water these people swim in.

This is the basic danger of a government that has grown too large. The federal machinery will trend Democrat no matter who happens to occupy the White House, Senate, or House of Representatives. And this is because the ideology that drives people to vote Democrat is also the ideology that makes them want to work for federal bureaucracies. The organizational culture in American federal service has become not just partisan but positively messianic during the age of Obama -- they're doing it for your own good, whether you know it or not! -- and the urge to suppress those with "wrong" opinions is becoming too strong to ignore. The tacit approval of Barack Obama and other powerful Democrat politicians removes any vestige of unease. It explains the near-complete lack of guilt or remorse shown so far by IRS management. In their minds, they are doing nothing wrong.

So what solution could possibly be suggested to address the inherent bureaucratic mentality of bias that permeates the IRS and other government agencies like the EPA, Department of Justice, etc...?

It's not non-partisan functioning the public seeks, but impartiality.

Maybe Ohio's structuring of the Board of Elections is the way to go.

Because of their obligation to conduct fair and impartial elections, and in order to ensure the sanctity of the vote, all BOEs are staffed equally by Republicans and Democrats. Every time a ballot or voting machine is handled, a Republican and a Democrat must be present and perform the function together.

The individual county offices are governed by a four-member board of two Republicans and two Democrats, nominated by the local parties and appointed by the Secretary of State. There is a director and assistant director to oversee the staff. The director is the opposite party from the chairman of the board and the assistant director is the same party.

By requiring both parties to be present and forcing a balance in the organizational chart, you ensure impartiality in a clearly partisan office.

Why not require that equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats be hired in all government agencies?

With equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats watching each other and ensuring the fair administration of election laws, you eliminate the type of one-sided internal culture that results in scandals like the IRS is currently experiencing.

Many state and federal boards and commissions require bi-partisan representation in their makeup. Why should the employees be any different?

This is not to say that problems won't arise or that such a system is without potential flaws:

* People are human and will make mistakes.
* Third parties won't like the two-party structure.
* Identifying individuals by party and then deciding who goes in order to ensure equal numbers is problematic (and doesn't address the potential for current employees to just change their party affiliation in order to keep their job).

But wouldn't a federal government comprised equally of Republicans and Democrats be better than what we have now?

Could George Orwell have imagined what's going on today?

Saturday marks the 64th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell's book 1984:

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel by George Orwell published in 1949. The Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (Ingsoc) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as thoughtcrimes. Their tyranny is headed by Big Brother, the quasi-divine Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality, but who may not even exist. Big Brother and the Party justify their rule in the name of a supposed greater good. The protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith, is a member of the Outer Party who works for the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue), which is responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism. His job is to re-write past newspaper articles so that the historical record always supports the current party line. Smith is a diligent and skillful worker, but he secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion against Big Brother.

With what's been going on lately, I can't help but wonder if we're there yet.

We have a media that is more interested in protecting their favored politician than in actually reporting the truth, often ignoring what should be major stories because they reflect negatively on their object of affection.

We have people calling for greater gun control as a means of preventing gun violence, yet Chicago - a city with gun-control laws these individuals would love to impose upon the rest of the nation - has one of the highest gun violence records in the country. How do these people not see the correlation?

We have children being expelled from school and even arrested because they have a toy gun or just drew a picture of one!

We have a monstrous government so completely out of control that the even President Barack Obama's former senior adviser David Axelrod says it's too big:

The government is simply too big for President Obama to keep track of all the wrongdoing taking place on his watch, his former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC. “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast,” he explained.

The IRS targeted tea party and patriot groups. The Department of Justice bugged the phones of the press.

Now comes this from the Washington Free Beacon:

Contracted employees at an Environmental Protection Agency warehouse in Landover, Md., used surplus equipment to set up a gym and personal television spaces, a report by the agency inspector general released Monday said.
...
“The warehouse contained surplus gym equipment arranged to create exercise space for warehouse employees,” the report states. “The weights, machines, exercise equipment, and overall exercise area appeared to be well maintained. The exercise space was in excess of 30 by 45 feet. Carpet tiles from EPA inventory were placed on the floor in the gym area. This area has electrical power through an EPA power strip and provides music through other agency inventory items. Agency steno pads were used for recording workouts.”

That wasn't the only EPA story to make the news. How gargantuan does an agency have to be to give a fake employee numerous certificates of award?

“Richard Windsor” may have only been an alias for former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson, but that didn’t stop him from being awarded numerous certificates for ethics and records management.

The EPA awarded certificates naming Jackson/Windsor a “scholar of ethical behavior.” Jackson, under her secret alias, was also awarded certificates for completing training modules on email records management.

Jackson set up a secret email address under the pseudonym “Richard Windsor.” The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner first discovered it in November.

Thank goodness for non-traditional media so we can know about these things, because we aren't going to get it from what passes for today's press corps - especially when you consider the latest from Erick Erickson.

The Democratic National Committee issued a memo saying Republicans were 'overreaching' when it comes to the IRS and other scandals. That was Friday - and by Monday that was the term being used by the press and others defending Pres. Obama and his administration.

We know the majority of the main stream media parrot whatever the Democrats want repeated, but apparently they're oblivious to how transparent they've become.

Add to this the recent court ruling that police can take a DNA swab of arrestees because it's just like taking fingerprints. And another court ruled that Google must turn over customer records to the FBI upon demand and without a warrant:

A federal judge has ruled that Google Inc. must comply with the FBI's warrantless demands for customer data, rejecting the company's argument that the government's practice of issuing so-called national security letters to telecommunication companies, Internet service providers, banks and others was unconstitutional and unnecessary.

Maybe it's not 1984 at all. I'm not sure that even Orwell could have imagined all this would become the norm.

IRS covered up 'tea party' policy in response to FOIA requests

Well, well, well...this gets more interesting day by day...

In 2011, The 1851 Center for Constitution Law made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the IRS asking for any "tea party" related policies. They were told there there no such documents. But the Inspector General's report showed specific policies were in place in 2010.

So they kept the information from Congress and the public.

Oh - and they also closed their FOIA reading room and locked the door..and no one had a key. Apparently "there's nothing worth reading in the FOIA public reading room anyway."

UPDATE: A very nice IRS disclosure officer tells @fschouten and me there's nothing worth reading in the FOIA public reading room anyway.

— Gregory Korte (@gregorykorte) May 16, 2013

This article from Ben Domenech really goes to the heart of the matter:

The point is that these scandals cut at the core conceit of Obama’s ideology: the healthy and enduring confidence of big government to be good government. As technological capabilities advance and the scope of government expands, the types of domestic scandals we’re seeing here are only going to increase in frequency and invasiveness, with personal information shared more frequently, easier for even low level bureaucrats to acquire and manipulate. At the same time, Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical and cynical about their public institutions, with their trust in the federal government at historic lows. They distrust the agencies and bureaucrats even as the politicians of our age are investing more and more power in them.

Today, the media, the Obama administration, and David Axelrod are undertaking the task that conservatives could not: illustrating with each passing day that the progressive approach to modern governance and policy is inherently flawed and that vast governments are ripe for abuse. What we are seeing from the IRS and the DOJ is not something new, nor does it represent a perverse approach to benign bureaucracy: it is the inevitable consequence of an approach which puts mechanisms in place and then assumes they will not be used for ill. You should expect government to go as far as it can, whenever it can, in any ways that it can, toward the full exploitation of the power made available to it. Expecting government to behave otherwise is to expect the scorpion not to sting the frog.

The progressive answer to this is more rules and regulators, more agencies and safeguards and accountability projects. Republicans should recognize this intervention for the ridiculousness it is – creating more federal entities to watch over federal entities – and focus their arguments instead on the only solution which will actually work: removing power from the federal government and returning it to the states or the people. The only way to ensure that government doesn’t abuse a power is to make sure it doesn’t have this power in the first place.

Here is the press release sent out by the 1851 Center. It's written by Lynn Walsh.

IRS Covered Up "Tea Party" Policy in Response to FOIA Requests

In 2011 FOIA response, IRS denied existence of records that Inspector General found clearly existed at the time

Columbus, OH - The 1851 Center for Constitutional Law today released a 2011 Internal Revenue Service response to its Freedom of Information Act request denying the existence of any "tea party"-related policy - - a policy that the Inspector General for Tax Administration has found to have clearly existed at that time.

Suspicious that the IRS may have been employing an "anti-tea-party" policy, the 1851 Center, through investigative journalist Lynn K. Walsh, submitted a June 2010 Freedom of Information Act request to the IRS for all documents related to this policy. In its 2011 response, the IRS headquarters, through "Disclosure Manager" Marie Twarog states as follows:

You asked for documents relating to any training, memos, letters, policies, etc., that details how the Tax Exempt/Government Entities Division reviews applications for non-profits, 501(c)(3) and other not for profit organizations specifically mentioning "Tea Party", "the Tea Party", "tea party", and "tea parties".

I found no documents specifically responsive to your request.

However, in its May 14 Report, the Inspector General specifically finds that "[t]he first Sensitive Case Report [identifying tea party groups] was prepared by the Technical Unit" in April of 2010 (See Page 32). The Report's Appendix goes on to chronicle the existence of a series of 2010 policies and related documents targeting "tea party" and other conservative organizations.

"Either IRS Headquarters was entirely incompetent in maintaining awareness of prominent policies and documents within the IRS, or it deliberately covered up the existence of anti-conservative IRS policies. Either is terrifying," said Maurice Thompson, Executive Director of the 1851 Center. "Legal action is necessary to ensure that the IRS does not lie to taxpayers in this manner in the future."

The released documents constitutes the most prominent evidence of either a cover-up or lack of institutional control related to the tea-party policies, and are the only example of the IRS specifically denying the existence of such policies in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Importantly, the IRS did not claim that the requested documents were exempt from FOIA; it instead claimed that the documents did not exist.

Yesterday, the 1851 Center released that in its May 20, 2010 response to the 1851 Center's application for tax-exempt status, the IRS demanded that, in order to receive approval of its application, the 1851 Center must: "Please explain in detail your organization's involvement with the Tea Party."

Read the IRS FOIA Response HERE.

Read the FOIA Request made to the IRS HERE.