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The thing we're discussing isn't a law, it's an internal agency procedure. It might or might not be a good idea but it's nothing anyone outside the agency has to follow.

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Very few governmental systems should operate in secret. Agency procedure _is_ defacto law.

If they have a non-documented system for stalling, sidelining or giving greater scrutiny to patents yet have a 1500 page operations manual doesn't that strike you as odd?

Internal agency procedure should be 100% transparent. "This is how we do things in this department" isn't a valid excuse for anything.

So the IRS should document (for public consumption) the exact algorithm it uses to decide which filings get extra scrutiny? Doesn't that open the door to quite a bit of abuse? (i.e. tax fraudsters being able to match just the precise set of conditions to not be audited).

Yes, the IRS should. The fraudsters (and rich people with expensive accountants) already have this info, for example by hiring former IRS examiners and executives. Making the algorithms public at least puts everyone on equal footing.

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