The investigation into the IRS

What happened

Congress launched its investigation this week into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups, as top IRS officials struggled to explain why Tea Party–affiliated organizations seeking tax-exempt status were singled out for extra scrutiny. Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee, the agency’s outgoing head, Steven Miller, said that a huge increase in workload, not partisanship, led midlevel IRS agents in 2010 to begin screening for terms such as “tea party” and “patriot” in the titles of groups applying for tax-exempt “social welfare” status. Miller added that the IRS had not yet identified the person who ordered the screening. “[How could we] come to the conclusion that this was not politically motivated?” said Republican Sen. Pat Toomey. “We don’t even know who made the decision.”

A batch of IRS emails released this week indicated that low-level employees decided on the criteria for extra scrutiny, without the approval of higher-ups. Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division that vets tax-exempt groups, told Congress that she had “not done anything wrong” and refused to answer a House committee’s questions.

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What the editorials said

It’s hard to believe that a few low-level employees decided to target conservatives on their own, said The Wall Street Journal. If it “is such a non-issue, why did it take the department so long to acknowledge its mistakes?” The inspector general reported that Miller had been informed about the focus on conservative groups back in May 2012, months before the presidential election. “If it wasn’t a political bombshell, why didn’t he make it public immediately?” Clearly, the White House is trying to hide something rotten, said The Washington Times. We can only hope that Congress gets “to the source of the stink.”

The real problem here is our overly complicated tax code, said The New York Times. Social-welfare groups are supposed to spend only 49 percent of their money on politics, but organizations like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS do nothing but politics. “The IRS employees didn’t understand the rules, the inspector general said, largely because the rules barely exist.” Given the confusion and years of abuse, a scandal was all but inevitable.

What the columnists said

Whether or not the White House played any role in the targeting of Tea Party groups, said Steve Huntley in the Chicago Sun-Times, this scandal reveals the danger of big government. The “point is that IRS bureaucrats have immense power to disrupt lives with intrusive audits based on political directives.” If they don’t like your beliefs, they have the right to harass you and pry into almost every aspect of your work and personal life. We need a “smaller IRS and more modest reach of government.” But thanks to Obamacare, the agency will only get bigger, said Dana Loesch in RedState.com. The IRS is charged with fining Americans who can afford health insurance but don’t buy it, and penalizing companies that don’t cover employees. “Do you trust these people to allow you the best care possible? I don’t.”

“The IRS isn’t too powerful—it’s too weak,” said Peter Beinart in TheDailyBeast.com. The agency’s budget has shrunk 17 percent since 2002, making it harder to audit groups seeking social-welfare status. Hundreds of applications for that tax-exempt classification poured in after the Supreme Court ruled that people and corporations could make unlimited political donations. Social-welfare groups became a favorite destination for political contributions from publicity-shy companies and billionaires, since these groups don’t have to disclose the identities of their donors. Now, thanks to this scandal, those same donors will face even less oversight as they “secretly determine the outcomes of American elections.”

The only real solution is to get the IRS out of politics, said Joseph Thorndike in The Washington Post. We should ditch the “social welfare” category, and require all nonprofits to act like charities, not partisan attack dogs. “If they can’t stomach political chastity,” these groups can become traditional Super PACs—exempt from taxes but required to disclose their donors. “Anything short of that will guarantee that we haven’t seen our last ‘outrageous’ IRS scandal.”