Ben Parris, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Ben Parris
The IRS Puzzle 6/24/2014 10:12:28 AM
How does the IRS find itself embroiled in the biggest inquiry since the targeting scandal of the Nixon administration?
From the author of: CREDS THE IRS ADVENTURE In my time at the IRS, which is to say the Reagan era, the agency was dominated, not by Democrats like me who had been disappointed by President Carter and still voted for local Democrats, but by rabid party operatives who were ready to hang the rest of us for the slightest diversion from the party line. They knew they had lost some Democrats to Reagan and they were screening registration records (which are public) and then threatening Democrats to vote for Democrats, and even posting professional intimidators at the polling centers to remind you when you got there.
As young as I was, this behavior stunned me but I was equally surprised to find that the President of the United States had no influence over the IRS. I thought that the former was a bad thing and the latter was a good thing. The president should be disconnected from the IRS. We'd learned that lesson from the sins of the Nixon Administration. In the intervening decade, the Republicans, at least, had been hands-off the IRS and it seemed to me that the Democrats had rushed in to fill the gap.
The extreme tactics were perpetrated mainly by the union, whose leadership viewed President Reagan as unfriendly to unions, but also came from self-motivated ideologues who were the equivalent of today's self-appointed Internet trolls. Did IRS employees at that time engage in illegal targeting of people they didn't like? Yes, there were documented and undocumented cases of that kind of abuse, reaching as high as mid-level officials who did this out of their own uncontrollable urges when invested with more power than they could responsibly handle. But upper level management consisted of patronage placeholders who did not know or care how the IRS worked, and the politicians themselves were firewalled. (And I'm not addressing here the law enforcement decisions of other agencies).
If the IRS continued along those lines, I would not expect that there was any White House involvement in targeting today. I would not be surprised, however, if there was some illegal targeting at the district level, and I think that all Americans, regardless of party, should desire an end to it for their own protection.
