In the latest development, a federal district court ordered the IRS to turn over information concerning groups that were subject to the mistreatment identified by the agency’s inspector general. The IRS didn’t like this and is now seeking a writ of mandamus in order to avoid having to disclose more information. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit is not amused.
Today’s opinion in In re United States of America/United States v. NorCal Tea Party Patriots denying the IRS petition begins:
Among the most serious allegations a federal court can address are that an executive agency has targeted citizens for mistreatment based on their political views. No citizen—Republican or Democrat, socialist or libertarian —should be targeted or even have to fear being targeted on those grounds. Yet those are the grounds on which the plaintiffs allege they were mistreated by the IRS here. The allegations are substantial: most are drawn from findings made by the Treasury Department’s own Inspector General for Tax Administration. Those findings include that the IRS used political criteria to round up applications for tax-exempt status filed by so called tea-party groups; that the IRS often took four times as long to process tea-party applications as other applications; and that the IRS served tea-party applicants with crushing demands for what the Inspector General called “unnecessary information.”
Tell Congress: Pass the Fair Tax Act of 2015! Sign the petition.