The IRS gets off easy in conservative targeting scandal

Reining in government agency overreach concerns everyone, and the recent dismissal of taxpayers’ lawsuits against the IRS disappointed many people. One of the lawsuits involved True the Vote, a Texas-based group that describes itself as a voters’ rights and election-integrity organization. It’s nonpartisan, but it is a conservative group. True the Vote applied for tax-exempt status as a charitable organization.

But the IRS delayed the application and hit the organization with invasive, irrelevant inquiries. And it wasn’t just the IRS, either. Five different agencies got involved with this otherwise simple request.

The delays did eventually end. The IRS finally granted charitable status to True the Vote about a year ago, in September 2013. But a process that usually takes two to four months took years from the time of the initial application. True the Vote sued the IRS, seeking redress for the damage it caused with all the harassment and delays and for constitutional violations.

“We showed that we’re willing to play hardball, and we’ll sue the IRS,” said Logan Churchwell, True the Vote’s communications director. “The IRS turned around and said, OK, we’re just going to give you the tax status now. Let’s make this go away.” Two lawsuits by True the Vote and Linchpins of Liberty were dismissed along with the cases of 41 other conservative organizations. U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush, wrote that because the IRS took steps to address the scandal by firing some people and saying it wouldn’t do it anymore, and because most of these groups finally did get charitable status, it’s all moot now. The judge pointed out he wasn’t assessing the IRS conduct. His ruling was completely on procedural grounds. He even suggested an alternate route for two of the plaintiffs, one from California and another from Ohio. He said they could sue the IRS on other grounds because the agency failed to make a ruling one way or the other within the required number of days.

Churchwell said the ruling wasn’t all that surprising. There’s fear among federal judges that allowing the cases to go forward would overwhelm the IRS with lawsuits from citizens. He said True the Vote is considering its options now. After all, it lost tens of thousands of dollars due to the delay and subsequent lawsuit. Those are damages from attorneys’ fees, accountants, and people who didn’t contribute because they couldn’t write it off their taxes as a charitable contribution. The emotional toll it takes when an ordinary citizen is forced to take on the federal government is hard to calculate.