Read the full story: National Review
The Internal Revenue Service might be done in by a group of the type it has been accused of targeting, and the agency seems to know it has been tripped up.
Several congressional committees have tried their hand at investigating the IRS, but Cause of Action (CoA), a government watchdog group, may be the ones to put the agency in a corner. IRS and Department of Justice officials are looking for ways to get the group off their tail.
“We’ve set up a trap for them,” CoA president Dan Epstein tells National Review Online. “We’re literally outsmarting them.”
For more than a year, CoA has focused on the IRS’s inconsistent application of the Internal Revenue Code’s rule 6103, which states that private taxpayer information must be kept confidential. Through a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) applications, CoA methodically requested documents pertinent to the White House’s potential unlawful acquisition of such information. The IRS appears to have moved to stonewall CoA, which has not yet received the documents it requested, and Epstein says that the delays amount to the IRS’s acknowledgment to at least some wrongdoing.
