The IRS‘ battle against holdout tea party groups is heating up again,
after the tax agency promised it would begin processing their
long-delayed applications, but sent a new round of prodding questions
demanding still more information.
The
IRS admitted in 2013 that it singled tea party groups out for intrusive
scrutiny, including crossing lines by asking questions about the
groups’ associations, meetings and even members’ reading habits. Some
groups received multiple letters, each time further delaying their
applications.
More jarringly, the IRS then publicly released one of the sets of
questions it sent to the Texas Patriots Tea Party — a move the group’s
lawyer says puts secret taxpayer return information, supposed to be
protected, out in the public.
Tax experts say the IRS may be on safe legal ground, since the filing
was made as part of a court case, and that’s one of the few narrow
exceptions to strict IRS privacy laws.
Still, the move to release the information has inflamed an already
tense class action legal battle between the IRS and tea party groups
who feel the agency is still targeting them more than three years after
it promised to cease.
“The IRS has taken the unprecedented step of publicly filing actual
return information,” said Edward Greim, who is handling the case on
behalf of more than 400 groups targeted by the IRS.
[MORE]
