The 5 Biggest Lies, Myths, And Debunked Claims Of The IRS Scandal
Remember the Lois Lerner emails the Internal Revenue Service said were lost? Thousands of them were just uncovered, and according to one investigator, they were “right where you would expect them to be.” It was just the latest iteration of a recurring trend in the IRS targeting scandal: investigators debunking attempts by the agency and its apologists to excuse, downplay, or cover up IRS’s abuse of conservative and tea-party groups.
Two years after it was first publicly exposed, here are the five biggest lies, myths, and debunked claims about the IRS scandal.
1. There Is ‘Absolutely No Targeting’ Program
Amid media reports in 2012 that the IRS was investigating dozens of tea-party organizations and demanding to know their political beliefs, twelve Republican senators sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman expressing concern with “excessive” IRS inquiries and seeking assurance that groups of all leanings received fair treatment. One week later, Shulman promised Congress, “There’s absolutely no targeting.”
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration exploded this claim in May of 2013 with a report titled, “Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review.” The report concluded that the IRS chose groups for review “based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of potential political campaign intervention.” It also determined that targeting began as early as March 2010, more than two years before Shulman insisted to Congress that no such program existed.
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