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01/10/2018

IRS Dodges Oversight, Refuses to Measure Economic Impact of its Rules: Investigative Report

Washington D.C. – Cause of Action Institute (“CoA Institute”) today released a groundbreaking investigative report, Evading Oversight: The Origins and Implications of the IRS Claim that its Rules Do Not Have an Economic Impact, that reveals how the IRS has developed a series of self-bestowed exemptions allowing the agency to evade several legally required oversight mechanisms. The report outlines in detail how the IRS created this exemption to exempt itself from three critical reviews intended to provide our elected branches and the public an opportunity to assess the economic impact of rules before they are finalized.

Read about the report in today’s Wall Street Journal, including suggestions for how the White House and Congress can work together to end this harmful practice.

CoA Institute Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor James Valvo: “The IRS for too long has evaded its responsibilities to conduct and publish analysis of its rules. Rules issued by the IRS can change the economic landscape for Americans in many ways, including how the agency calculates deductions, exemptions, reporting, and recordkeeping. By creating bureaucratic loopholes, the IRS deliberately sidesteps several oversight mechanisms designed to provide a check on overly burdensome rules. The IRS should be held to the same standard as other regulatory agencies and stop avoiding its responsibilities.”

For years, the IRS has evaded several laws directing agencies to create economic impact statements for rules. These analyses are part of three oversight mechanisms: The Regulatory Flexibility Act, the Congressional Review Act, and review by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  All three are good-government measures designed to provide a check on abuse by the administrative state.

CoA Institute’s investigative report reveals the origins and implications of the unprecedented IRS position that its rules have no economic impact and do not require such analysis because, it claims, any impact emerges from the underlying law that authorized the rule, and not the agency’s decision to issue or alter it.

The full report, including executive summary and key findings, can be accessed HERE.

For information regarding this press release, please contact Zachary Kurz, Director of Communications at CoA Institute: zachary.kurz@causeofaction.org.

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11/9/2017

The Forgotten 21 Disks: The IRS’s Unlawful Disclosure of Taxpayer Data to DOJ & FBI

Just as the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) targeting scandal was beginning to fade from Washington’s collective memory, it returned to the forefront of the national political scene with a vengeance.  It started with the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) decision in early September to forgo further criminal investigation of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials because of allegedly insufficient evidence of “criminal intent.”  Shortly thereafter, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s (“TIGTA”) released an audit review that expanded upon the watchdog’s 2013 report, which had concluded the IRS inappropriately selected conservative tax-exempt applicants for heightened scrutiny based on their names and policy positions rather than objective criteria.  TIGTA’s new report found that the IRS had similarly mistreated left-leaning groups.  As my colleagues argued, TIGTA’s findings hardly diminished the import of the earlier investigation, but “widen[ed] the scope of IRS misconduct and increase[ed] the urgency for further changes at the agency.”  More importantly, the report impliedly highlighted the absence of any serious attempts to root out the cause of IRS politicization.

While TIGTA announced its revised findings, the IRS rolled out a work plan for the Tax Exempt and Government Entities division—the component in which Ms. Lerner worked—which signaled efforts to develop “data-driven” criteria and “analytics” for IRS decision-making.  That, of course, raised the curious question of what exactly the IRS meant by “data-driven” and what criteria it previously had been using to assess tax-exempt compliance.  And this development was followed in quick succession by a DOJ announcement that it had reached a settlement agreement with some of the so-called “Tea Party” groups, who successfully argued their constitutional rights had been violated by the IRS.  Finally, Commissioner Koskinen ended his tenure as head of the IRS and, on the way out the door, tried—yet again—to downplay TIGTA’s role in exposing IRS wrongdoing.  “Sometimes they get a little carried away with their reports,” he suggested.

Lost in all this news—particularly, the DOJ decision not to reopen a criminal investigation—was the government’s stunning admission that confidential taxpayer data was, in fact, unlawfully disclosed by the IRS to the DOJ Public Integrity Section and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  As Cause of Action Institute (“CoA Institute”) reported last year, the DOJ Inspector General (“DOJ-OIG”) confirmed that “protected taxpayer information was included on compact discs (CDs) that the IRS provided to the Department [of Justice] in response to a Department request.”  Those infamous twenty-one disks contained more than 1.1 million pages of return information on different tax-exempt groups.  DOJ-OIG summarily concluded that the “matter does not warrant further investigation.”  TIGTA, which was also alerted to the unlawful disclosure, refused to comment.

DOJ ostensibly sought this trove of non-public information as part of the Obama Administration’s efforts to prosecute exempt entities for engaging in prohibited political activity.  Given the pattern of IRS abuse and politicization in previous administrations, however, those stated goals were always suspect, particularly given Ms. Lerner’s involvement.  Now, in light of TIGTA’s revelations about the scope of the IRS’s targeting, progressives should be as alarmed as conservatives about the lack of accountability for one of the largest and most significant breaches of taxpayer confidentiality laws in U.S. history.

When it confirmed that taxpayer data had been mishandled, DOJ-OIG also claimed that DOJ informed Congress about the unlawful disclosure.  We filed a Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) request last year to investigate the matter.  That request has gone unanswered.  We filed two additional follow-up requests last month (here and here), one of which also seeks records about the processing of the 2016 request.  To date, the authorities have refused to hold anyone at the IRS or DOJ accountable for the wrongful disclosure of countless pages of Americans’ private tax information.  The importance of these records cannot be overstated.  CoA Institute remains committed to bringing them to public light.

Ryan P. Mulvey is Counsel at Cause of Action Institute

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11/3/2017

Has the IRS Changed Its Selection Criteria or Just a Machine?

In May 2013, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (“TIGTA”) reported audit results showing that between May 2010 and May 2012, the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) used “inappropriate criteria” to identify which organizations’ applications for tax-exempt status it would give heightened scrutiny.  TIGTA found that IRS selections had been based on groups’ names or policy positions rather than objective indicia that groups might act outside the requirements and limitations for tax-exempt status under 26 U.S.C. § 501(c).  As restated by TIGTA in its latest Review of Selected Criteria Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review, published this month, “using names and/or policy positions instead of developing criteria based on tax-exempt laws and Treasury Regulations is inappropriate.”

The IRS asserts it has been reforming its review-selection process ever since in an effort to develop “data-driven” criteria and use “data analytics to inform decision-making.”  For example, the latest work plan for the Tax Exempt and Government Entities 2018 fiscal yeatar says the IRS will “continue to improve Form 990, 990-EZ, and 990-PF compliance models” as part of a new “data-driven approach” to checking compliance and selecting returns for examination.  The phrases “data-driven selection criteria” and “data analytics” can conjure algorithms and black-box calculators that are supposed to mirror impartial decisions and whose lack of bias is notoriously difficult to understand without expert background and sophisticated mathematics.

The IRS’s description of its approach, however, proffers something much simpler that does not involve sophisticated mathematics or algorithmic analysis.  Instead, its new “data-driven” approach involves analyzing informational returns for indicia that the group is operating outside the restrictions of the tax-exempt statutes or not complying with reporting obligations.  So, under the 2018 Plan, examinations will target organizations whose returns show the “highest risk of Employment Tax non-compliance” (such as 1099 information showing “high distributions” or numerous employees but “zero or minimal Medicare and/or Social Security wages paid”).  And examinations will focus on entities that do not file schedules required by their Form 990 information.  More generally, when an entity’s Form 990 suggests it has taxable business income unrelated to its charitable purposes, an examination should ask whether the entity filed Form 990-T and if not, why not.

If this “data-driven” approach is new, a few questions arise:  How was the IRS using data from Form 990 series returns before now?  Why weren’t these compliance criteria used previously?  Shouldn’t the IRS have been flagging these potential problems all along?

In any event, to the extent “data-driven” analysis does not rely on names or policy positions but instead focuses on objective indicia of compliance with the law and Treasury regulations, the new approach will be better than the IRS’s past inappropriate practices.  But if that’s all that’s being changed, and the data being relied upon is still from Forms 1023 and 990, then perhaps “machine-driven” better captures the new examination-selection criteria than “data-driven.”

Mike Geske is Counsel at Cause of Action Institute.

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10/27/2017

Newest TIGTA Review Shows Broader Extent of Political Targeting by IRS

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a proposed consent order settling a federal case in which scores of organizations allege that the IRS violated their rights to free speech, free association, and equal protection of the law when it screened their applications for tax-exempt status on the basis of their names and policy positions alone. In the consent order the IRS admits its process was wrong and the Court will declare that “discrimination on the basis of political viewpoint in administering the United States tax code violates fundamental First Amendment rights.” That’s a spectacular settlement and a welcome outcome for the plaintiffs. But it will not end the IRS’s continuing practice of preparing sensitive case reports for supervisory review whenever an application or request for information might “attract media or Congressional attention.” The Internal Revenue Manual provisions that authorize sensitive case reports are where the scandal of political targeting by the IRS began. And until those provisions are withdrawn, cases and requests that an administration considers “sensitive” but outside the terms of the new consent order may still get special treatment within the IRS.

In a 2013 Audit Report, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (“TIGTA”) found that the IRS “inappropriately identified specific groups applying for tax-exempt status” whose applications would receive special scrutiny. Over a two-year period beginning in May 2010, the IRS inappropriately identified those groups “based on their names or policy positions instead of developing criteria based on tax-exempt laws and Treasury Regulations.” The result was a process by which the IRS demanded and examined additional information from these groups after labelling them “Tea Party cases,” and the ensuing controversy was dubbed the “IRS Tea Party targeting scandal.”

In its new 2017 Review, published earlier this month, TIGTA recounts how the IRS developed and used 17 “selection criteria” between 2004 and 2013 to identify which groups and applications for tax-exempt status deserved extra attention. Politicians and media outlets are claiming that the 2017 Review proves there never was an “IRS Tea Party targeting scandal” because the IRS also used names and policy positions to select progressive, liberal, and Democratic-affiliated groups for heightened scrutiny. A Washington Post headline sums up the revisionist interpretation:  “Four years later, the IRS tea party scandal looks very different.  It may not even be a scandal.”

This 2017 Review provides new information, disclosing that the IRS sometimes used names and political positions alone as selection criteria for heightened scrutiny of tax-exempt applications instead of the organization’s activities and the requirements of the Internal Revenue Code and related regulations. The initial 2013 Audit Report was limited to two years of IRS practice beginning in May 2010 because that was “the first date that [TIGTA was] informed that the Determinations Unit was using criteria which identified specific organizations by name.” 2013 Audit Report at 9 n. 20.  Yet the 2017 Review shows that the same kind of “inappropriate” practice began at least five years earlier, and neither the new 2017 Review nor the early press and political commenters recognize the significance of this revelation.

Yes, as the early reactions suggest, two of the overtly partisan criteria identified in the 2017 Review are tied expressly to the Democratic Party and “progressive” partisans.  But the IRS first used these criteria to choose applications for heightened scrutiny way back in 2005 and 2007, during the George W. Bush administration.

At the end of 2007, the IRS selected applications from groups named in the “Emerge network of organizations” whose purpose “was to train women to run as Democratic candidates for public office.” By September 2008 the IRS highlighted the “Emerge” criterion in an e-mail alert and training.  Up to 12 applications may have been affected by the Emerge criterion, either initially or upon subsequent review.

In October 2005 the IRS began using the “Progressive” criterion, identifying “the word ‘progressive’” and the “Common thread.”  In April 2007, the IRS noted further that the groups “appear as anti-Republican” with “references to ‘blue’ as being ‘progressive.’”  Up to 74 applications may have been affected by the Progressive criterion.

These two criteria are no small potatoes. Together, the Emerge and Progressive criteria may have played an inappropriate role in more than half (96 of 181) of the applications considered in the 2017 Review.

Two other criteria identified in the 2017 Review are overtly partisan for the other side. Just before the 2010 mid-term elections, the Obama IRS looked for “Pink Slip” and “We the People” in names or titles as proxies for Tea Party groups to select tax-exempt applications for special examination. And in the run up to the 2012 general election in which President Obama was re-elected, the IRS began using “Paying the National Debt” to identify applications for extra scrutiny, a criterion which overlapped with “We the People.”

So, reporters and politicians who claim that the IRS’s inappropriate use of names and policy positions was never a scandal are ignoring the important chronology revealed in the new 2017 Review. By claiming that this selection process was not scandalous because goose and gander got the same sauce without considering who applied that sauce and when, they are condoning politically influenced tax decisions at the IRS so long as the law allows presidents of both political parties to harass their political opponents. But wrongs on both sides don’t make a right. As John McGlothlin of Cause of Action Institute opined last week in “The Hill,” the 2017 Review shows that “neither side focused on the larger point – that citizens from both sides of the political spectrum, were being denied their rights.”

Politics periodically infects tax enforcement and administrations of both parties have used political targeting by the IRS. But as Cause of Action Institute has discussed many times, the larger point is that the IRS and Congress have turned blind eyes to the identifiable, current provisions in the Internal Revenue Manual that allow such meddling. So inappropriate political targeting by the IRS remains a threat under the agency’s own regulations, even now under President Trump. Leviathan’s nature is to flee reform, so let’s hope Congress exercises its power to tame that beast, and soon. Without those reforms, the IRS can and inevitably will continue to use  inappropriate, politically-charged criteria in enforcement, investigatory, and compliance decisions, to evade congressional reforms, and to avoid accountability.

Mike Geske is counsel at Cause of Action Institute.

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10/24/2017

The IRS scandal has not disappeared – it’s gotten worse (The Hill)

The IRS scandal has not disappeared – it’s gotten worse

BY JOHN MCGLOTHLIN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 10/20/17

Judging by the reaction of many elected officials and media outlets, the latest report on the IRS targeting scandal is cause for relief. But a closer look shows the opposite is true – by finding that the agency mistreated a variety of left-leaning groups, the report widens the scope of IRS misconduct and increases the urgency of further changes at the agency. Read the full op-ed at The Hill

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10/5/2017

Litigation Update: Ensuring Access to Records of the Executive Branch’s Interaction with Congress

In December 2016, Cause of Action Institute (“CoA Institute”) sued the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) after it refused to produce a variety of records concerning its dealings with the Joint Committee on Taxation .  The IRS claimed that all such records, which CoA Institute requested under the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”), would be “congressional records” exempt from disclosure.  Yet the IRS never conducted a search.  Instead, it based its determination on questionable guidance from its Office of Chief Counsel, which contradicts long-standing legal precedents for when agency records must be provided to the public.

The IRS moved to dismiss CoA Institute’s lawsuit for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, arguing that because any and all responsive records were presumptively “congressional,” the court lacked the authority even to hear CoA Institute’s arguments.  Once again, the IRS founded its position on the Chief Counsel’s guidance, as well as generalized descriptions of a consistent course of “confidentiality” in IRS’s communications with the Joint Committee on Taxation.  CoA Institute opposed the IRS’s motion and explained that the agency’s position relied on a serious misunderstanding and misapplication of the law, prescribed an overbroad and unjustified approach to distinguishing “agency” and “congressional records,” and would sweep a broad range of records, which should otherwise be subject to the FOIA, into an “exempt” category.  As I have argued elsewhere, “[t]he mere fact that a record controlled by an agency relates to Congress, was created by Congress, or was transmitted to Congress, does not, by itself, render it a congressional record.”  Its availability instead depends on whether Congress manifested clear intent to maintain its control over it.  Here, the IRS had failed to meet its burden in demonstrating that intent.  How could the agency do so when it refused to conduct a search for the very records at issue?

During oral argument at the end of August, the Court expressed its reservation about the novelty of the IRS’s argument and its presumptive application of the relevant legal standards to exclude categorically all of the requested records as being “congressional” records.  The Court also questioned whether the IRS had properly moved to dismiss for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, rather than moving to dismiss for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted.  Although the distinction may seem like mere “legalese,” it is an important one that affects what sort of evidence outside the pleadings the Court may examine and whether the Court lacks authority to adjudicate a claim arising under federal law (i.e., subject-matter jurisdiction), or simply has no basis to provide the relief sought by a plaintiff, (i.e., an order to disclose non-exempt agency records).

Yesterday, CoA Institute filed a supplemental brief, arguing that the Court was correct to question whether the IRS had properly moved to dismiss for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction.  It is important that the Court reach the right answer to this procedural question.  It will have important implications for FOIA litigation.  The government, here and in other recent FOIA cases, seeks to collapse merits determinations—e.g., whether a requester has sought “agency records”—into jurisdictional questions.  The courts should not allow that to happen.  There is already an asymmetry of knowledge between requesters and agencies.  Forcing a requester to fight an agency on jurisdictional grounds, without the benefit of a search having been conducted and relevant records identified, is not only unfair but would provide the government yet another tool to evade its transparency obligations under the FOIA.

Ryan P. Mulvey is Counsel at Cause of Action Institute.

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09/28/2017

Cause of Action Institute Signs Second Coalition Letter Warning of Continued Congressional Interference with the FOIA

Cause of Action Institute signed a letter yesterday, joining a broad coalition of government transparency advocates, warning members of the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the U.S. House of Representatives about the dangers of mounting congressional interference with the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) and, specifically, continued efforts to expand the definition of “congressional records” not subject to disclosure. The letter comes in the wake of the House Committee on Ways and Means’ motion to intervene in a lawsuit filed by American Oversight, a left-leaning government transparency group.

The letter reiterates much of the argument found in a May 2017 coalition letter from government transparency advocates urging Jeb Hensarling, the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, to rescind his directive that federal agencies treat any and all records exchanged with the Committee as exempt from the FOIA. As I have previously discussed, the mere fact that an agency possesses a record that relates to Congress, was created by Congress, or was transmitted to Congress, does not by itself render it a “congressional record.” The law instead requires that Congress manifest clear intent to maintain control over specific records to keep them out of reach of the FOIA.  Chairman Hensarling and the leadership of the Ways and Means Committee are pushing the boundaries of this legal requirement.

Cause of Action Institute continues to investigate Chairman Hensarling’s controversial, and legally dubious, attempt to frustrate public access to records of the Executive Branch’s dealings with Congress, as well as similar efforts undertaken at the Internal Revenue Service. The transparency community and the general public must remain united in protecting the spirit of disclosure and open government promised by the FOIA.

Ryan Mulvey is Counsel at Cause of Action Institute.

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