The IRS Remains a Continually Corrupt Bureaucracy

With April 15th – Tax Day – quickly approaching, the IRS is once again on the minds of the American public.

Millions of Americans are preparing to file their tax returns.  But with a continually corrupt bureaucracy administrating our voluntary tax system, many Americans have cause for concern.
This is an agency that has admitted to targeting so-called “conservative-sounding” groups and continues the discrimination despite assurances from IRS Commissioner John Koskinen that all problems have been addressed.

This is an agency that President Obama assured the American public has not committed a “smidgen of corruption.” But facts are stubborn things, and the facts are that the IRS actively hid evidence of its targeting practices until after the 2012 Presidential elections in order to shield the President from any controversy.

And finally, this is an agency that requires full transparency from American citizens through its audit process while stonewalling, ignoring, and evading any transparency of its own.  Could you or I refuse to answer questions from the IRS or blame missing documents on a computer crash?  Yet that’s what former senior IRS official Lois Lerner has done, managing a scandal-ridden IRS division while her own hard drive is conveniently destroyed and refusing to testify about what really happened.

The Obama Administration may think that it can successfully stall and ultimately kill the IRS scandal, but here at the ACLJ, we continue to pursue our federal lawsuit against the IRS for its unlawful practices.

We know better than anyone to not trust and continually verify. We simply cannot believe the rhetoric of Commissioner Koskinen that the problem has been remedied. As lawyers, we deal with evidence, and the facts show otherwise.  We’ve been fighting the corruption from the beginning, representing two 501(c)(4) groups that still await a determination on their tax-exempt status. One of our clients has been waiting for a determination for over five years.

The IRS continues to target this group and other Americans to this day.  It’s outrageous.

Although President Obama may think that he can copy the IRS’s “death by delay” tactics to stifle this scandal, we continue the fight in federal court to ensure that such plans do not succeed.
In our appeal to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, we continue to represent 38 targeted conservative groups from 22 different states. Despite the IRS’s best attempts to intimidate these groups into limiting their political activity or withdrawing their applications altogether, we stand united behind them to ensure justice is served and the constitutional rights of these grassroots conservatives – U.S. citizens – are protected.

We refuse to allow the IRS to become an organization weaponized against conservative Americans, and we continue to fight to ensure that all groups, regardless of ideology, receive equal consideration under the law.

Through its own actions, the IRS has proven that it is not a neutral organization simply concerned with accurate accounting. It has become a political attack dog, incapable of self-correction. With your voice, we will continue fighting in federal court to ensure that the IRS wrongdoing is exposed to the American people and the abuse is ended once and for all.