Va. lawmakers back probe of IRS

While the IRS’ admission that it targeted conservative groups for additional scrutiny puts increasing pressure on President Barack Obama’s administration, Virginia lawmakers from both sides of the aisle condemned the agency’s actions and underscored their support for an investigation.

In Virginia, meantime, the Shenandoah Valley Tea Party joined its counterpart in Richmond in charging that its organization was improperly targeted by the IRS.

“There’s no excuse for ideological discrimination in our system,” Sen. Timothy M. Kaine, D-Va., said Monday. “The administration should take swift action to get to the bottom of this to ensure those responsible for misconduct are held accountable and establish appropriate safeguards to prevent this from ever happening again.”

Sen. Mark R. Warner, D-Va., called the IRS’ actions “appalling” and “completely unacceptable.”

“We need a quick but thorough investigation, and those who are found to have been responsible for this betrayal of the public trust should be fired,” Warner said.

An investigation of the IRS was launched Friday after a senior IRS official apologized publicly for subjecting conservative political groups to “inappropriate scrutiny.”

In a practice that drew complaints during the 2012 election, groups with the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their names were flagged for closer review when they applied to the agency for tax-exempt status.

But Lois Lerner, director of the agency’s tax-exempt office, also said that the screening of the conservative groups was “absolutely not” influenced by the Obama administration.

The president said at a news conference Monday morning at the White House that if the reports are true, “then that’s outrageous and there’s no place for it — and they have to be held fully accountable.”

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-7th, announced Friday that the House will launch its own investigation of the agency. “The IRS cannot target or intimidate any individual or organization based on their political beliefs,” he said.

Rep. Scott Rigell, R-2nd, said the IRS’ actions validate the general level of distrust in government that these groups share.

“The irony is not lost on me that these groups are simply asking for accountability and transparency from the federal government — two of the very principles that were violated by the IRS,” Rigell said.

For several years, the IRS had been under pressure from campaign finance watchdogs and Democrats to crack down on abuse of the 501(c)4 tax exemption, which is supposed to go to organizations primarily promoting “social welfare” but which is often granted to overt political advocacy groups.

The number of groups seeking 501(c)(4) status jumped after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which lifted government limits on corporate spending in federal elections.

Bruce Richmond, director of the Shenandoah Valley Tea Party, said, “We applied for a 501(c)4 with a 19-page application in April of 2010. ... We didn’t receive any written response until Jan. 31, 2012.”

He said that when he finally got a response from the IRS 20 months after submitting the application, it was in the form of a demand to answer “38 intrusive questions” within 10 days.

It took the group a two-week extension and a “massive amount of work” to respond to the questions, Richmond said.

“We tracked the number of hours we spent researching the answers to the IRS demands; it took over 235 hours, with the resulting report weighing 10 pounds and measuring 7 inches thick,” he said, adding that “an apology is not enough.”

“The employees in Cincinnati that caused this abuse should be fired or at least demoted to a position where they cannot cause harm,” Richmond said.

The Northern Virginia Tea Party did not even try to file for tax-exemption status, said Ron Wilcox, the group’s lead organizer. “We were discouraged by what we saw other groups go through,” he said.

“We have about four times as much statewide activity as other tea party groups,” Wilcox said. “With that in mind, it would have made it unfeasible for us to go through the application process.”

Mark Daugherty with the Virginia Federation of Tea Party Patriots, an umbrella group for local organizations around the state, said that many are convinced that the IRS’ effort to target tea party groups for scrutiny happened with a purpose.

“We don’t believe that the IRS agents in Cincinnati are to blame, because we don’t believe that they have acted without authority from above,” Daugherty said.

On Saturday, Laurence Nordvig, the executive director of the Richmond Tea Party, said members of his organization also had become suspicious during protracted questioning over a two-year period in which the group was trying to qualify for nonprofit status, which it was eventually awarded.

“For a period of two years, IRS officials intentionally obstructed our organization’s attempts to qualify for a simple nonprofit status, at the cost of hundreds of man-hours and thousands of dollars,” he said in a statement.

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