Hacker News Reader

Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

> By that time, the Republican narrative had taken hold: The IRS had to be “held accountable” for wasting millions on lavish conferences and persecuting conservative nonprofits for their political beliefs.

That is very dismissive of some very salient complaints about how groups were targeted. Read the Wikipedia article. This isn't moonbat pizzagate nonsense. Among keywords targeted were "open source software", "medical marijuana", and "Israel".

A Democratic senator said:

> U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) said, "We should not only fire the head of the IRS, which has occurred, but we've got to go down the line and find every single person who had anything to do with this and make sure that they are removed from the IRS and the word goes out that this is unacceptable."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

View on HN

Definitely not great behavior. The idea this was purely an anti-conservative thing when OSS advocacy is on this list is where my eyes glaze over though. Just on its face there is a lot of evidence in the other direction

>Ryun has stated he believes that Greenhouse Solutions benefited from its name (although the quick approval might also be due to the fact that Greenhouse Solutions was already operating as a nonprofit and was already on-file with the IRS.)

Like “conservative claims bias (but here is the real explanation).” Might as well place “claims to be innocent “ in the profile of every person in Shawshank

The insistence of people bringing up this thing as a conservative thing only when there were liberal groups also being targeted (There could have been a proper bipartisan effort against this!) is mind-boggling.

In the TIGTA report from 2017, the Senate Finance Committee (and the IRS itself) found that most, but not all, of the potentially political applications set aside for scrutiny by the IRS were Tea Party and conservative groups. The committee also found that the IRS used names and policy positions in order to identify groups for scrutiny. I think there is evidence to say there was an anti-conservative bias.

see TIGTA report: https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2017reports/2017...

I don't care to rehash the argument, but targeting nonprofits based on their names is at best arbitrary and uneven. Maybe it was accidental that conservative groups felt targeted. But given that non-profits aren't in the business of lawsuits, it's a due process concern when the IRS is arbitrary.

Some sort of heuristic based on random sampling or less political profiling (location, governing structure, association with known tax evaders) makes more sense.

Yep, I had never really dug too much into this (partly because I would hear about it from people I know to act in bad faith), but I agree on the arbitrariness being a due process concern.

I do feel like "random sampling" would make a lot more sense here. Other profiling feels like it might end up in the same spot though. Really the ideal thing is to improve the processes/rules and give enough resources to where they don't feel the need to have to pull fringe-political-shaped needles out of haystacks in the hopes that those needles happen to also be non-compliant shaped.

Incentives are all weird here, and we end up in these messes. And some people take advantage of that to create a narrative that makes it _even harder_ to solve the real problem (imagine asking for more resources for compliance after this "IRS is being used for politics" stuff)

The reality is that 100% of the groups "targeted" by the IRS, mostly Republican and a few Democratic, were and are obviously, blatantly violating tax law in order to launder political activity through a fake tax-free group, to dodge taxes and hinder accountability. Every one of them was and is guilty. For every election cycle nowadays, thousands of these paper front groups are created for laundering political funds, and most of them are discarded at the end of the cycle. It's the most blatant tax fraud imaginable.

Every US government agency charged with looking into this said as much - no political bias, IRS completely right to do what it did, which is "enforce tax law".

However, political pressure from Republicans and a few Democrats convinced the IRS to back down, which was a sad outcome for people who dislike corruption in their government.

And recently, the Trump government used a lawsuit settlement to funnel a great deal of taxpayer cash to Republican operatives based on a very flimsy claim. That's an excellent method of backdoor embezzlement itself - just have Republican groups sue the government for anything and have the executive branch "settle" their claims for infinite dollars.

More like “Democratic”. She played the “see, I can be a Conservative too!” game to try to get the “small government” voters, and it didn’t even work anyway. Might as well quote Rand Paul because the whole “IRS is mean to Republicans” was definitely not a bipartisan belief except for red state Democrats.

I don't really understand your point.

Should audit selection be completly random? If your goal is to catch fraud, isn't it good to try and prioritize audits based on probability of fraud hapenning?

I'm also not sure what is discriminatory. Is being audited costly to the organisation? Otherwise, it shouldn't really be a big deal to be audited no? Unless you're actually committing fraud. Or to I misunderstand the scandal, and they claim that people were fined even though they didn't commit tax fraud?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com