Here is my reaction to today’s Associated Press article that the “the Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status.”

The IRS needs to come clean – what did they know and when did they know it?  Why has there been a delay in admitting this gross violation of First Amendment rights?

In March 2012, the IRS commissioner gave incorrect information to Congress about this sorry episode.  An apology blurted out at a conference of lawyers isn’t enough.  Worse, it was in response to a question!

These groups spent thousands of dollars and countless hours responding to an IRS assault on their political beliefs.

Today’s revelation is not the first massive violation by the agency.  In the last year alone, the IRS has illegally disclosed confidential tax return information of politically sensitive non-profit groups on at least three occasions involving an unknown number of organizations.

This incident proves Congress should not pass pending legislation to give the IRS more power over advocacy or political groups.  The agency abuses that power, doesn’t understand the need to exercise it with caution, or is simply incompetent to exercise it with care.

The collection of trillions of dollars in taxes each year is based on what the IRS calls the self-assessment feature of the tax laws, where citizens and businesses calculate and pay their taxes. If the agency develops a reputation as a partisan attack dog, that could lead to more citizens cheating on their taxes, with potentially disastrous implications for the budget deficit. If the level of compliance with just the income tax laws alone were to drop just one percentage point due to a decline in the Service’s reputation for fairness, that could cost the government over $170 billion in tax collections over a 10 year period.