One survey found that 75% of IRS respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie to Congress.
By James Bovard
Many Republicans are
enraged over revelations in recent days that the Internal Revenue Service
targeted conservative nonprofit groups with a campaign of audits and
harassment. But of all the troubles now dogging the Obama
administration—including the Benghazi fiasco and the Justice Department's
snooping on the Associated Press—the IRS episode, however alarming, is also the
least surprising. As David Burnham noted in "A Law Unto Itself: The IRS
and the Abuse of Power" (1990), "In almost every administration since
the IRS's inception the information and power of the tax agency have been
mobilized for explicitly political purposes."
President Franklin
Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers who were opposed to the
New Deal, including William Randolph Hearst and Moses Annenberg, publisher of
the Philadelphia Inquirer. Roosevelt also dropped the IRS hammer on political
rivals such as the populist firebrand Huey Long and radio agitator Father
Coughlin, and prominent Republicans such as former Treasury Secretary Andrew
Mellon. Perhaps Roosevelt's most pernicious tax skulduggery occurred in 1944.
He spiked an IRS audit of illegal campaign contributions made by a government
contractor to Congressman Lyndon Johnson, whose career might have been derailed
if Texans had learned of the scandal.
President John F. Kennedy
raised the political exploitation of the IRS to an art form. Shortly after
capturing the presidency, JFK denounced "the discordant voices of
extremism" and derided people who distrust their leaders—President Obama
didn't invent that particular rhetorical line. Shortly thereafter, JFK signaled
at a news conference that he expected the IRS to be vigilant in policing the
tax-exempt status of questionable (read: conservative) organizations.
Within a few days of
Kennedy's remarks, the IRS launched the Ideological Organizations Audit
Project. It targeted right-leaning groups, including the Christian
Anti-Communist Crusade, the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation
for Economic Education. Kennedy also used the IRS to strong-arm companies into
complying with "voluntary" price controls. Steel executives who
defied the administration were singled out for audits.
A 1976 report by the
Senate Select Committee on Government Intelligence on the Kennedy program
noted: "By directing tax audits at individuals and groups solely because
of their political beliefs, the Ideological Organizations Audit Project
established a precedent for a far more elaborate program of targeting
'dissidents.'"
After Richard Nixon took
office, his administration quickly created a Special Services Staff to
mastermind what a memo called "all IRS activities involving ideological,
militant, subversive, radical, and similar type organizations." More than
10,000 individuals and groups were targeted because of their political activism
or slant between 1969 and 1973, including Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling (a
left-wing critic of the Vietnam War) and the far-right John Birch Society.
The IRS was also given
Nixon's enemies list to, in the words of White House counsel John Dean,
"use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies."
The exposure of Nixon's
IRS abuses during congressional hearings in 1973 and 1974 profoundly weakened
him during the uproar after the Watergate hotel break-in. The second article of
his 1974 impeachment charged him with endeavoring to obtain from the IRS "confidential
information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law,
and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax
audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a
discriminatory manner." Congress enacted legislation to severely restrict
political contacts between the White House and the IRS.
In the following decades,
the IRS regularly sparked outrage by abusing innocent taxpayers, but there was
not much controversy about the agency's politicizing until Bill Clinton took
office.
In 1995, the White House
and the Democratic National Committee produced a 331-page report entitled
"Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" that attacked
magazines, think tanks and other entities and individuals who had criticized
President Clinton. In the subsequent years, many organizations mentioned in the
White House report were hit by IRS audits. More than 20 conservative
organizations—including the Heritage Foundation and the American Spectator
magazine—and almost a dozen individual high-profile Clinton accusers, such as
Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, were audited.
The Landmark Legal
Foundation sued the IRS in 1997 after being audited. Its brief quoted an IRS
official who had explained at an IRS meeting in San Francisco that audit
requests from members of Congress or their staff had been shredded and also
suggested how future requests from Capitol Hill could be camouflaged. The IRS
told the court that it could not find 114 key files relating to possible
political manipulation of audits of tax-exempt organizations.
One potential bombshell of
the Clinton era that went relatively unrecognized was an Associated Press
report in 1999 that "officials in the Democratic White House and members
of both parties in Congress have prompted hundreds of audits of political
opponents in the 1990s," including "personal demands for audits from
members of Congress." Audit requests from congressmen were marked
"expedite" or "hot politically" and IRS officials were
obliged to respond within 15 days. Permitting congressmen to secretly and
effortlessly sic G-men on whomever they pleased epitomized official
Washington's contempt for average Americans and fair play. But because the
abuse was bipartisan, there was little enthusiasm on Capitol Hill for an
investigation.
The IRS has usually done
an excellent job of stifling investigations of its practices. A 1991 survey of
800 IRS executives and managers by the nonprofit Josephson Institute of Ethics
revealed that three out of four respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie
when testifying before a congressional committee.
The agency also has a long
history of seeking to intimidate congressional critics: In 1925, Internal
Revenue Commissioner David Blair personally delivered a demand for $10 million
in back taxes to Michigan's Republican Sen. James Couzens—who had launched an
investigation of the Bureau of Internal Revenue—as he stepped out of the Senate
chamber. More recently, after Sen. Joe Montoya of New Mexico announced plans in
1972 to hold hearings on IRS abuses, the agency added his name to a list of tax
protesters who were capable of violence against IRS agents.
With the current IRS
scandal, we may have seen only the tip of the iceberg. Thorough congressional
investigations would no doubt help reveal the extent of the operation, and the
criminal investigation announced by the Justice Department on Tuesday may prove
fruitful as well. Regardless of what these inquiries uncover, though, we can be
almost certain that IRS audits will remain irresistible political weapons.
Mr. Bovard is the author, most recently, of the e-book memoir "Public Policy Hooligan."
No comments:
Post a Comment