Educate yourself

Posted on: September 20, 2022 at 17:56:59 CT

In late September 2017, an exhaustive report by the Treasury Department's inspector general found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny, blunting claims that the issue had been an Obama-era partisan scandal.[1][2] The 115-page report confirmed the findings of the prior 2013 report that some conservative organizations had been unfairly targeted, but also found that the pattern of misconduct had been ongoing since 2004 and was non-partisan in nature.

In reaction, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, stated "After years of baseless claims and false accusations it is my hope Republicans will finally put an end to this witch hunt and admit that their attacks on the I.R.S. were nothing but political grandstanding on behalf of special interests at the expense of American taxpayers." In contrast, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Kevin Brady of Texas, responded by saying that "this report reinforces what government watchdogs and congressional investigators have confirmed time and time again: Bureaucrats at the I.R.S., such as Lois Lerner, arbitrarily and haphazardly administered the tax code and targeted taxpayers based on political ideology."[1] Regardless of reaction, the release of the report brought to an end the last formal governmental investigation into the IRS practice.