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Articles

Surprise! The IRS Audited Campaign Donors

Published in Liberator Online .

Surprise! The IRS Audited Campaign Donors

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By now, just about everyone knows the Internal Revenue Service targeted Tea Party and other right-leaning nonprofit groups because of their ideological beliefs. But the latest wrinkle in the story, one that hasn’t been widely reported, is the IRS audited donors to right-leaning nonprofits based on the reports they submitted.

IRSAccording to documents obtained by Judicial Watch, in 2010, then-Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, D-MT, urged the IRS to “survey major 501(c)(4), (c)(5) and (c)(6) organizations .” The IRS complied, in 2011.

“In 2010, after receiving Baucus’s letter, the IRS considered the issue of auditing donors to 501(c)(4) organizations, alleging that a 35 percent gift tax would be due on donations in excess of $13,000. The documents show that the IRS wanted to cross-check donor lists from 501(c)(4) organizations against gift tax filings and commence audits against taxpayers based on this information,” Judicial Watch explained. “A gift tax on contributions to 501(c)(4)’s was considered by most to be a dead letter since the IRS had never enforced the rule after the Supreme Court ruled that such taxes violated the First Amendment. The documents show that the IRS had not enforced the gift tax since 1982.”

“But then, in February 2011, at least five donors of an unnamed organization were audited,” Judicial Watch adds.

One of the groups specifically mentioned as targets by the IRS was Crossroads GPS, which was founded by Karl Rove. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was also mentioned as an organization that could be subject to scrutiny. Lois Lerner, the disgraced former IRS official who became the subject of congressional inquiries into the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups, approved of the gift tax auditing scheme.

“These documents that we had to force out of the IRS prove that the agency used donor lists to audit supporters of organizations engaged in First Amendment-protected lawful political speech,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said in a press release. “And the snarky comments about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the obsession with Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS show that the IRS was targeting critics of the Obama administration.”

“President Obama may want to continue to lie about his IRS scandal,” he said. “These documents tell the truth – his IRS hated conservatives and was willing to illegally tax and audit citizens to shut down opposition to Barack Obama’s policies and reelection.”

The IRS is, perhaps, the most corrupt agency in the federal government – and that’s saying something. The Tea Party scandal and the documents uncovered by Judicial Watch only skim the surface of recent problems. If there’s one federal agency that deserves to be torn apart, brick-by-brick, it’s this one, folks.


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