I have no long comment to make about the IRS. The comments are certainly being made by every news organization. What I find interesting are the groups from the other side that are now coming out and saying that they, too, believe that they have been audited for political purposes in the recent past. The NAACP was investigated for two years by the IRS. All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena was threatened with removal of its tax-exempt status because they opposed our presence in Iraq. PETA was investigated by the IRS three times, with the last investigation being 20 months long. Greenpeace has taken out a full page add–on 17 May 2013–to comment on the IRS audit it, too, suffered.
There are additional organizations from the liberal side who have come out and spoken up about their audits. I went to the website of each one of them and they, too, are asking that groups of their type be included in the Congressional investigation of the IRS.
It appears more and more to be true that the IRS sees itself as somehow ensuring that groups that they perceive as being “extreme,” whether conservative or liberal, are “controlled” for the good of the country. Hopefully, both sides can unite on this one issue and put some severe restrictions on IRS investigations as well as enshrining citizen and group rights during audits into federal law and code. I am to the point that I would welcome a Constitutional amendment that enshrine citizen and group rights in their dealings with federal, state, and local governments. Apparently the first ten amendments are not enough.
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