Profiling is not ok...Follow

The name of the group should have no bearing on whether they're flagged for further investigation though. Doubly so when the name selection targets names that are associated with one broad "side" of our political spectrum. I mean, I'm fine with them taking a close look at "terrorist bombers unite", or "child killers of america". But in this case, they were targeting based on names associated with simply being a conservative oriented organization, which is not cool at all.

Fixed.

Here's a portion of the list, in case you were interested

Healthcare, Progressive, Blue, Medical Marijuana, Occupy, Advocacy.

Not saying it's right that they did use the name to determine the level of scrutiny, but it's clear it wasn't because they were conservative oriented. It clearly targets groups who have left leaning, "partisan and anti-republican" views.

Edited, Jun 27th 2013 7:20pm by TirithRR

Er. Did you read the paper you linked? First off, it's massively redacted. Secondly, without understanding how these different categories of applications were handled, we can't assume anything by the mere presence on this list. For example, one of the categories is "Accountable Care Organizations". These are defined as organizations created by the Affordable Care Act. They're given special attention, and I'm going to assume that "special attention" in this case doesn't mean "ignore their application for a couple years".

Also, "Occupy"? You clearly didn't bother to read the document you linked. Unless you meant to refer to organizations advocating action regarding occupied territories mostly in the middle east. Was that what you meant?



No. It clearly identifies and categorizes a wide assortment of common types of applications. What it does based on those categories is the issue here.

Sure. But that's the complaint. It's not that some internal sorting process was involved, but that said process resulted in a clear difference of outcomes based along fairly blatant political lines. If you noticed in that BOLO document, different categories of applications were sent to different numbered groups within the IRS for processing. Based on the data we're seeing, I think it's pretty reasonable to wonder what group conservative leaning organizations were steered into, and how that groups handling of applications differed from other groups in order to create such a large discrepancy. And then you kinda have to ask why those differences existed.

I know a few people who work at the IRS (and have met more through them), they come in all different political flavors. While I don't discount the possibility of the occasional rogue person with a personal political agenda, this is far too widespread to have been that. It looks far more like the group that conservative organizations were routed to was given a set of rules to follow that were more strict than other groups. Those working in the group wouldn't necessarily make note of it. They're just told that cases that come to them require X, Y, Z steps to be followed. And the folks routing the cases wouldn't necessarily make note of it either. They're just told to look for certain attributes of applications and route to different groups based on them. Add in the significant increase in new hires in the IRS over the last few years, and it's quite possible for none of the rank and file folks doing the actual work to realize there was anything unusual going on.

But someone had to set those rules for that group. And that's where the potential for abuse of power comes in. I don't think it's at all unreasonable for people to demand that we investigate and find out how that happened and who made it happen.