I'll comment right now! If that information was illegally leaked, it is serious and inexcusable. Those responsible have some explaining to do, and possibly should be prosecuted. This leak issue is apart from that of whether NOM is qualified under IRS rules for 501c(4) status in the first place. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that they are primarily a political organization and that any "social welfare" function they perform is, by comparison, minimal . If so, they should not have 501c(4) status. Permitting them to file under 501c(4) would be still another IRS screw-up! It also appears that any organization can file under 501c(4) status without prior approval, and get a tax break. (We taxpayers are "happy" to subsidize them in their "social welfare" work.) However, as with any other entity, their return should be subject to audit, and should the IRS find that in their opinion the return was not eligible under 501c(4), the IRS should bill for back taxes due plus interest, and possibly a penalty. It must be obvious to everyone, including IRS employees, that if they are going to audit 501c(4) returns, they absolutely must develop written criteria for selecting returns that can not be influenced by the political slant of the submitting organization. But there are thousands of organizations filing under 501c(4)!, so God help the IRS! (In my personal opinion, all of the predominately political organizations that have filed under 501c(4) status have filed fraudulent returns -- as it defies comprehension that any of these organizations could actually think that they were primarily a social welfare organization as defined by the IRS guidelines.) Seems to me, the more this business drags on, that the Congress created a Pandora's box, and the IRS opened it when they let the very first, primarily-political organization file under 501c(4).
I haven't looked at the IRS regs to see what it takes to qualify, but it does seem to me you are painting with a very wide brush. Just because a group is interested in political topics does not make it political, or at least it would seem so to me. It could be primarily educational. If a group is dedicated to informing the public about the evils of government spending and ignoring the Constitution, is that political or is it educational? This whole issue is a sideshow designed to distrct the public and minimize the apperarance of wrongdoing. Even if these groups did not meet the regulations, which I dispute, it is still wrong and proibably illegal for the IRS to single them out for harrassment based on political criteira. It is perfectly obvious to anyone with an open mind that is exactly what happened, and the only real question is how high up the food chain it went. Considering the lies and obfuscation, I am guessing pretty high.
I agree with your remarks. The IRS rules for qualifying for 501c(4) make it absolutely clear that political activities can not dominate the organizations activities, dominate, unless other spelled out, is going to be interpreted as more than 50 %. So for example if more than 50% of money raised after expenses is spent on political advertising for example, or in sponsoring a candidate running for election. That would disqualify the organization. (That's just a simple, but obvious to both of us, example.) Where you get into shades of gray would be for example sponsoring an ad that does not mention any political candidate by name or picture them, but supports a particular viewpoint that figures prominently in an on-going political campaign. An example would be an ad by a right-to-life organization that promotes adoption versus abortion. Such an ad probably can come under the heading "social welfare" and I would guess would not disqualify the organization. Or, for example, a pro choice ad that similarly does not mention or show any candidate, would probably not, I would think, disqualify the organization. What we have learned is that we either need to eliminate 501c(4) altogether, or else write very clear unambiguous rules, and then uniformly enforce them. The problem for the IRS is that their are thousands of organizations filing under 501c(4) and no possible way that the IRS can fairly audit that many organizations with the man power they have.
You seem to have a pretty good grasp of this situation. You are obviously skilled at research. I would be interested in results from your research of the number of audits and/or other targeting by the IRS toward conservative groups VS liberal groups over the last 30 years to the current scandal. This would be categorized by such targeting or audits that occured under either Democratic or Republican administrations, in other words, the number of targetings against groups of the opposite ideology under the admin at that time. The audits would include groups filing for tax exempt statusalong with organizations selected for audit during those times, including news organizations (print, audio, and television). Interested? You could start with Reagan's admin. I'm interested in your findings, and how you feel about them.
My guess is that the information to do such a study is in the IRS files and could be obtained, however it would take many hours of labor. I wonder if the information gained would be worth the cost. In any case looking for political bias in the IRS audit records would be a job for an independent, non-politically aligned, investigator appointed and paid for by Congress. But here is a recent article from Bloomberg regarding the current IRS investigation. It would appear, if the article is to be trusted, that the motives of Investigator Issa are at least as impure, if not much more so, then the motives of the investigated. http://www.businessweek.com/article...ssas-irs-investigation-is-falling-apart#r=rss
tthe motives of that article are a least as impure as yours and cummings. what a spun up piece of garbage.
I didn't read the article that way. Clearly, it was anti-Issa. It said he had "failed" because he hasn't turned up a link to Obama. I rather thought his job was to get at the truth of what actually happened, then deal with it, which it seems to me he is doing despite considerable IRS stonewalling. The fact remains that the IRS Commissioner had virtually unprecedented access to the WH and that Obama also had an alarmingly close relationship with the head of the IRS union. Add in the Chicago thug culture Obama has brought to government, his unrelenting partisanship and demagoguery, and you have to be awfully gullible to believe this wasn't at least tacitly approved from on high.