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Conservatives Crawl out of the Woodwork to Claim IRS Persecution

Stephanie Mencimer — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:00:14 +0000

Wayne Allyn Root is no fan of President Barack Obama. He's a former Libertarian Party candidate for vice president and a "birther" who has questioned whether the president was really born in America. (Root studied at Columbia University when Obama was there and has questioned whether Obama really attended the school.) Root has been audited by the IRS—twice. And in recent days, within the right-wing media, he has become something of a poster child for the IRS scandal, suggesting that the IRS targeted him because of his political activity.

On Fox News last week, he proclaimed, "I am the face of Obama’s IRS attacks." In WorldNet Daily, he recently wrote, "As an outspoken critic of Obama, I've been under IRS attack since January of 2011. I am living proof of how bad it is, when it started and that it was directed at individuals, not just conservative groups." Root has offered his services to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), should Paul need a congressional witness.

But the root of his troubles could be not his anti-Obama politics, but his own finances, for Root's less-than-conventional tax returns might have indeed warranted a close look.

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Is This Big Tea Party Group Really an Innocent Victim of the IRS?

Stephanie Mencimer — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:00:13 +0000

Tea Party Patriots cofounder Jenny Beth Martin has been all over the airwaves since the IRS story broke, talking about how her group was among those whose applications for nonprofit status were unfairly targeted for extra scrutiny. She has called the IRS's actions a "disturbing, illegal, and outrageous abuse of government power." She told Fox News that Tea Party Patriots wants the agency repay it for expenses it incurred as a result of the "intrusive" questions it asked, including requests for "every single post on Facebook" and "every comment that any person who's a fan of ours on Facebook had ever made." On Friday, lawyers for her group sent a letter to the IRS alerting the agency to coming lawsuits over its "illegal" conduct.

More MoJo coverage of the IRS tea party scandal

Actually, Tea Party Groups Gave the IRS Lots of Good Reasons to Be Interested

The IRS Tea Party Scandal, Explained

Is This Big Tea Party Group Really an Innocent Victim of the IRS?

How Congress Helped Create the IRS-Tea Party Mess

Official at Heart of IRS Tea Party Scandal Spiked Audits of Big Dark-Money Donors

5 Things You Need to Know in the Inspector General's IRS Tea Party Scandal Report

But while the IRS has admitted to unfairly targeting some conservative groups, Tea Party Patriots, a national umbrella organization for the grassroots movement, may not have been one of them. As I reported last week, although IRS officials engaged in misconduct, they also may have had good reason in some cases to scrutinize groups whose financial and tax histories raised questions, including Tea Party Patriots. The group engaged in a type of creative accounting that the IRS said it specifically planned to crack down on, and TPP drew criticism from some of its own constituents for a lack of financial transparency. Moreover, the IRS received a formal complaint about TPP—when I filed one in 2011 after the group refused to provide me with a financial disclosure required by law.

When I first started covering the tea party movement in mid-2009, TPP had quickly emerged as one of its biggest players. It began in February 2009 as a loosely organized group of activists, officially incorporating that June as a self-identified 501(c)4 tax-exempt organization. (Nonprofits can self-designate their status even before applying officially with the IRS.) The group got heavily involved in the 2010 midterm elections: In September 2010, TPP announced that it had been given a $1 million anonymous donation to "get out the vote" during the campaign, while another wealthy anonymous donor—whom I later identified as conservative Montana millionaire Raymon Thompson—lent the group's leaders his private jet. (See this video of Martin and TPP cofounder Mark Meckler jetting around the country to rally the tea party troops just ahead of the election.)

Despite evidence that lots of money was pouring into the organization, TPP had disclosed little about its internal finances; its own members began complaining about the jet, hotel, and travel costs its leaders were running up, and a lack of transparency. Rhode Island tea party activist Marina Peterson told me then that the large anonymous donation troubled her, especially because she had no idea what the national leaders were doing with it. "How do we know we want to take that money if we don't know who the person is?" she asked. "What if it was George Soros?"

A few days after the 2010 election, I asked the IRS for a copy of TPP's 990 form, an annual reporting return for nonprofits. The form is a significant window into a nonprofit's finances, showing how much money it raised, how some top employees were compensated, and how much of its budget went to its social-welfare mission. Under standard nonprofit practices, the return should have been filed by November 2010 in TPP's case.

In January 2011, the IRS responded that it had no record of TPP being an exempt organization, and no 990 form from the group. I inquired with TPP about this and asked for a copy of the return. Randy Lewis, then a spokesman for the group, told me that the application for nonprofit status was still being prepared and that the 990 form would be available after April 15. (Alan Dye, the lawyer who handled TPP’s nonprofit application told me last week that TPP had in fact filed its application in December 2010. He says that the IRS neglected the application for a few months before they began processing it. He says TPP's application still hasn’t been approved.)

When tax day in April 2011 rolled around, I once again asked TPP for a copy of its 990 form, which is required by the government even if the group's nonprofit application is still pending. I made several phone and email requests to the group's leaders, all of which they ignored. At the end of that May, I filed a formal complaint with the IRS office in Dallas that handles issues with exempt organizations. I also faxed a letter with a copy of the complaint to Lois Lerner, the currently embattled head of the IRS's Exempt Organizations Division.

Then, out of the blue in July 2011, Dye's office finally sent me a copy of TPP's completed form—for tax year 2009. Signed by a tax preparer on February 12, 2011, it covered the period between June 2009 and May 2010. TPP had set its fiscal year to end May 31, a move that allowed it to avoid publicly disclosing the results of months of fundraising in the run-up to the 2010 elections—which fed into a total haul of more than $12 million—for another full year. By comparison, the North Houston Tea Party, which was started around the same time as TPP in 2009, and which prided itself on making all of its financial information public, filed its 990 form for 2009 nearly a year before TPP, in June 2010, with its fiscal year ending December 31, 2009.

Technically TPP's move was legal, and not an uncommon practice—but the IRS had become focused on stopping it. Marcus Owens, a DC tax lawyer with the firm of Caplin & Drysdale, who served for 10 years as the director of the Exempt Organizations Division, told me back then that shifting the tax year is an old trick used by political groups to delay disclosure. He said the IRS had made one of its goals for 2011 to crack down on this type of foot-dragging by nonprofits in light of all the anonymous money flooding the political system after the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. This was another reason that the IRS might have flagged TPP's nonprofit application for further review.

Diligent tea party groups that played by the book may well have been unfairly targeted by the IRS. But a thorough investigation of what happened would also account for whether some groups deserved to be put under a microscope. TPP's Martin and others who are now loudly protesting that they’ve been persecuted may not be so happy about what else might come to light as a result of further investigation.

Actually, Tea Party Groups Gave the IRS Lots of Good Reasons to Be Interested

Stephanie Mencimer — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:02:20 +0000

Virtually everyone in Washington agrees on at least one thing about the IRS scandal: The tax agency's trolling for tea party groups and giving extra scrutiny to their applications for nonprofit status was an egregious violation. Exactly how and why that conduct took place remains under investigation. But as conservatives in particular decry the IRS failure, it's also worth considering the dubious fiscal history of some tea party groups, including their pursuit of non-profit status. While the IRS had absolutely no business profiling any groups based on political criteria, it is not blaming the victim to observe that scrutiny was warranted in specific cases—and they include some major tea party outfits and their leaders, documents show.

Indeed, despite the tea party's emphasis on fiscal prudence in government, would-be nonprofit groups launched since the movement's rise in 2009 have left a trail of tax-code shenanigans, infighting, and fiscal irresponsibility. Money raised by some groups was spent frivolously, and in some cases in ways that appeared to flout the tax rules barring nonprofits from political activity. There have been lawsuits between competing organizations over money, and tea party groups have disintegrated because of financial and other mismanagement.

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How the Mormons Ensured Victory for Gay Marriage

Stephanie Mencimer — Fri, 10 May 2013 10:00:12 +0000

After a very long and demoralizing losing streak, supporters of marriage equality have recently experienced a string of victories so sudden and dramatic that it has their heads spinning. Just yesterday, the Minnesota House passed a bill that would make it the 12th state to legalize same-sex marriage. The vote came while the ink was still drying on Delaware's landmark new marriage equality law, which followed on the heels—five days!—of a similar milestone in Rhode Island. Up until last November, supporters had tasted defeat on 33 state-level measures.

But after Election Day, change was in the wind. Voters in Maine, Minnesota, Washington, and Maryland came down firmly on the side of same-sex marriage. You could credit folks like Ellen DeGeneres and NFL punter Chris Kluwe and basketball star Jason Collins—and even a few die-hard Republicans such as Dick Cheney, who has come out in favor of marriage equality—for helping bring about the rapid cultural shift. And no doubt that's a big part of it. But there's one force, perhaps greater than any other, that shouldn't be underestimated: the Mormon church's political surrender on gay marriage.

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House GOP Advances Fake Pro-Working-Mother Bill

Stephanie Mencimer — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:44:24 +0000

In February, in the wake of their bruising loss at the polls in the 2012 presidential election, Republicans in Congress decided to launch a concerted effort to change their image and lure back a critical group of voters who abandoned the party in droves last year: women. To that end, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) gave a high-profile speech about how the party intended to "make life work" for working families. He emphasized women-friendly ideas like improving education, reducing the cost of college, and other key work/life balance issues. Among those he touched on was the idea of flex time. Cantor said:

If you're a working parent, you know there’s hardly ever enough time at home to be with the kids. Too many parents have to weigh whether they can afford to miss work even for half a day to see their child off on the first day of school or attend a parent-teacher conference.

Federal laws dating back to the 1930s make it harder for parents who hold hourly jobs to balance the demands of work and home. An hourly employee cannot convert previous overtime into future comp-time or flex-time. In 1985, Congress passed a law that gave state and municipal employees this flexibility, but today still denies that same privilege to the entire private sector. That’s not right...

Imagine if we simply chose to give all employees and employers this option. A working mom could work overtime this month and use it as time off next month without having to worry about whether she’ll be able to take home enough money to pay the rent. This is the kind of common sense legislation that should be non-controversial and moves us in the right direction to help make life work for families.

Flex-time as Cantor described it sounds great on paper—every working parent's dream even! But of course, the devil is in the details. Those details come in the form of the Working Families Flexibility Act, a bill Cantor introduced in April. Far from helping working families, the proposed legislation would instead deprive them of the longstanding right to be paid time-and-a-half for overtime. The bill would allow companies to give hourly workers comp time in lieu of overtime if the workers agree to it. That might not be such a terrible thing, except that the bill doesn't give workers any power to decide when to use the comp time. The employer gets to decide that. If the employer fails to let the worker use a bunch of accrued comp time, the bill would allow the worker to demand the overtime compensation in cash, but it gives the company 30 days to make good on the payment. And if the company stiffs the worker on the overtime compensation, the bill prevents workers from complaining to the US Department of Labor, as they can now, and instead forces them to try to find a lawyer who will take up their cause to collect a few hundred dollars worth of back pay, a fairly toothless enforcement measure. The bill, supported by the US Chamber of Commerce, is a backdoor attempt to shield big companies like Wal-Mart from costly lawsuits they've seen stemming from their systematic refusal to pay low-wage workers the overtime to which they're legally entitled.

All of this is why women's groups aren't signing on to the bill. The legislation "only pretends to give people the time they need to manage the dual demands of work and family," Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership on Women and Families, said this week as the bill moved forward in the House. "It is insulting that the House is wasting time with a bill that would make things so much worse."

Republicans' track record of helping working families is truly dismal, and one speech from Cantor isn't going to change that. Republicans fought the Family and Medical Leave Act tooth and nail (the first President Bush vetoed the bill twice before Bill Clinton finally signed it in to law) and have refused to expand it to include more people or paid leave so families could actually use it. This is the same party that rabidly opposes the Healthy Families Act, which would provide paid sick leave for more workers, a measure public health officials say is critical not just to family sanity but to the nation's health. Perhaps what's most depressing about the GOP's new working families bill is that Republican leaders thought women were dumb enough not to notice that it was just a cynical attempt to win women's votes while still catering to the GOP's big corporate backers.

Florida Passes Law To Speed Up Executions

Stephanie Mencimer — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:29:20 +0000

States across the country have spent the last few years reconsidering the wisdom of capital punishment. Over the past six years, five states have abolished the death penalty entirely, including Maryland just last month. But Florida, where the execution rate is second only to Texas, isn't having that conversation. Instead, Gov. Rick Scott (R) is currently considering a bill passed by the legislature this week that would speed up executions in the state by limiting "frivolous" appeals by inmates and shortening the time they spend on Death Row. (Florida has about 400 people on Death Row, 10 of whom have been there more than 35 years.)

Called the "Timely Justice Act," the bill would create new deadlines for certain filings and force the state to move faster towards an execution after a ruling by the state supreme court. Florida legislators behind the bill believe it will save money (executions currently cost state taxpayers about $24 million each) and bring closure to victims, but legal advocates say that it's likely to do nothing but raise the possibility that Florida will execute an innocent person. They're on pretty solid ground with that argument, given that 24 people on Florida's Death Row have been exonerated since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s.

It's not very hard to convict someone of a capital crime in Florida, which is the only state in the country that allows a jury to recommend a death sentence with only a simple majority vote of 7 to 5. Also, the state has one of the nation's worst indigent defense systems, ensuring that anyone facing a capital charge is likely to get a bad lawyer in the deal. Because of other state budget crises, Florida has slashed the money available for indigent defense, and it caps the fees in a capital case at $15,000, an amount that barely covers a lawyer's time in court through the trial. The fees are so bad that few lawyers will take capital cases. (Florida's indigent defense system is generally a mess. After the state legislature in 2009 set very low flat fees for private lawyers who are appointed to handle criminal defense cases, lawyers fled the system in droves. Things got so dire that at one point judges attempted to force lawyers to take the cases through "involuntary" appointments.)

The lawyers who do take the capital cases are often largely incompetent. Florida made the news a few years ago after one of its mentally ill death row inmates, Albert Holland Jr., won a US Supreme Court case in which Justice Stephen Breyer found that Holland did a better job of representing himself than his court-appointed lawyers did. The New York Times explains what sorts of representation Holland had gotten in Florida:

Consider Kenneth Delegal, who was assigned to defend Mr. Holland at a 1996 retrial on charges that he killed a Pompano Beach police officer in 1990. Mr. Delegal was removed from the case after being sent to a mental health facility. Later, the two men would see each other at the Broward County jail, where Mr. Delegal was held on drug and domestic violence charges.

The next lawyer, James Lewis, was a friend of Mr. Delegal’s and had shared office space with him. When Mr. Delegal went to court after his removal from Mr. Holland’s case, seeking to be paid about $40,000 for his work on it, the new lawyer testified on behalf of the old one, saying the fees had been “reasonable and necessary.”

Mr. Delegal died of a drug overdose about a month after the fee hearing, and a local paper asked his former colleague Mr. Lewis about his troubles. “I heard some rumors,” Mr. Lewis said, “but I chose not to know.”

The new Florida bill attempts to address the issue of terrible lawyers and the appeals they generate by setting competence standards for lawyers taking capital cases, and it would bar anyone found guilty twice of giving "constitutionally deficient representation" from handling another capital case for five years. But the bill doesn't provide any more money to pay for more competent counsel.

The bill's opponents haven't convinced Florida lawmakers of any of this. During a legislative debate last week, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R) said, "Only God can judge. But we sure can set up the meeting." The bill awaits Scott's signature.

Florida Tea Party's Unemployment Tests Get Flunked by the Feds

Stephanie Mencimer — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:50:24 +0000

Tea partiers revere the Constitution, which they often study like the Bible, in small groups. But somehow all that devotion to the Founders' original thinking doesn't seem to have much of an impact on their ability to follow its requirements once tea partiers take power in elected office. Take the case of Florida's GOP governor Rick Scott, who has turned Florida into the nation's premiere laboratory for tea party governance. He's been trying for years now to force poor single mothers to take drug tests before getting welfare benefits, a requirement that's since been shot down in federal court twice as likely unconstitutional. And the US Department of Justice is threatening to sue the state for unconstitutionally warehousing disabled children in geriatric nursing homes.

Then there's the state's unemployment benefits system, which was "modernized" by the legislature under Scott's leadership in 2011 to become one of the nation's stingiest. A new law required unemployed people to file all claims for benefits online, even though previously at least 40 percent of UI claims were done over the phone. The new online filing system required people to take a "skills review" test that included 45 math and reading questions. Failing to take the test would result in losing eligibility for benefits.

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Study: Siri Doesn't Make Texting While Driving Any Safer

Stephanie Mencimer — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:11:28 +0000

April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month, a time when safety and transportation experts beg, plead and cajole Americans to put down their phones while driving, lest they become a murderer behind the wheel. It's a thankless job, as American drivers suffer from some serious delusions about their abilities to pilot a car safely while texting their girlfriends, shopping on eBay, or dialing in to Rush Limbaugh. Despite the fact that a quarter of all motor vehicle crashes today involve cellphone use, Americans still think it's only other drivers who are the problem. More than 90 percent of drivers think other drivers texting or using cellphones behind the wheel are a threat to their personal safety, yet two in three of them do it anyway, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

Elected officials have been reluctant to address the problem, passing legislation that reinforces drivers' delusions—like the law here in DC that allows people to drive and talk on the phone so long as they use a hands-free device, even though there's no evidence that talking on a Bluetooth is any safer than just holding up the old phone. (Spend some time in DC cabs to get a sense of how well this law is working out.)

Phone companies have been trying to come up with technical solutions that might head off further attempts by lawmakers to curb cellphone use while driving. The latest of these has been the suggestion that Siri can help. The idea is that simply talking to your phone to send a text rather than punching in the message would somehow allow people to keep their eyes on the road and drive safely while texting. As it turns out, the notion that an app will save lives is as faulty as the promise that the Bluetooth would.

A new study out from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute this month found that:

Driver response time was terrible regardless of whether the driver was manually texting or using Siri.
Texting drivers of any sort took twice as long to react to roadway hazards than when they were off the phone.
Texting drivers spent a lot of time not looking at the road, regardless of whether they were using a voice-to-text app.
Manual texting was actually quicker than using a voice app, but driving performance was equally bad in both cases.

The new study also found a new form of distracted driving delusions: Drivers felt less safe when they were texting, but they felt safer using a voice app than texting manually, even though their performance on the road was equally dangerous.

Moral of the story: When you get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, just put down the damn phone! And just as a chilling reminder of why this is important, watch this video:

Here's Why You Shouldn't Take Antibiotics for a Sinus Infection

Stephanie Mencimer — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:00:07 +0000

Sinus infections are nasty beasts. They leave you exhausted, drowning in green snot, seeing double from face pain, and ready to beg your doctor for antibiotics. Roughly 20 percent of all adult antibiotic prescriptions in the United States, it turns out, are written to treat sinusitis. In fact, I got one of those prescriptions just a few weeks ago, even though antibiotics are almost entirely useless for the condition, and may be causing more harm than good.

Antibiotics only kill bacteria, but a whopping 90 percent of sinus infections are caused by viruses, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America. What's more, new research over the past year has proven definitively that antibiotics won't change the course of most sinus infections.

More MoJo coverage of bacteria and health:

Are Happy Gut Bacteria Key to Weight Loss?

This Is Your Body on Microbes

Should You Take a Probiotic?

Poop Therapy: More Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Fecal Transplants

Can Antibiotics Make You Fat?

Antibiotics As Key to Curing Starvation

Why You Shouldn't Take Antibiotics for a Sinus Infection

The rampant misuse of antibiotics to treat conditions they can't possibly cure is one major reason for the alarming rise in the number of "superbug" outbreaks—infections by deadly bacteria that have evolved the ability to survive most antibiotics. (The other reason has to do with overuse of antibiotics by factory farms.) The more antibiotics you take, the more likely that you'll develop a drug-resistant infection. That's because, while the drugs kill most of the bacteria, the most naturally resistant ones are most likely to survive—and multiply.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has spent a decade trying to convince doctors to stop dispensing antibiotics for viral conditions in order to preserve the effectiveness of these crucial lifesaving drugs. Meanwhile, a host of medical specialty groups have launched a new "Choosing Wisely" campaign designed to educate patients about unnecessary treatments. The program specifically emphasizes avoiding antibiotics for sinusitis.

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Big Corporations Won't Be Sweating the IRS This Year

Stephanie Mencimer — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:00:12 +0000

Lots of average Americans who filed their tax returns this week will soon face the unpleasant prospect of having those returns audited. But corporations with at least $10 million in assets (or far more) have much less to fear from the tax man. Behemoths such as Microsoft and General Electric have taken a beating in the press lately because of how little in US taxes they pay, thanks to extremely complicated and aggressive use of offshore tax havens. The criticism doesn't seem to have affected how corporations are treated by the IRS, though. According to a new report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, in the current fiscal year, the IRS plans to devote 18 percent less effort to auditing companies with more than $10 million in assets than it did just two years ago. The agency has seen a $1 billion budget cut in the past year, and all of this comes before the effect of the sequester, which will slash $600 million from its budget this year. The IRS also projects that the amount of time available for specialized agents to conduct these audits will drop 14 percent as well, thanks to staffing cuts.

The IRS measures employee budgeted time in staff years, whose decline is shown in this chart:

Large Business and International Division Direct Examination Staff Years Transactional Records Access Clearing House

While the amount of staff time devoted to auditing the average Joe has gone up 62 percent since 2011, it's fallen nearly 30 percent for corporations. The IRS's workforce today is 23 percent smaller than it was in 1992, even though the number of returns filed has gone up 27 percent over the same period, according to TRAC. The acting IRS commissioner testified before Congress on April 9 that the agency is down 10,000 employees compared to what it had during the 2010 tax season. And the agency is being asked to do even more work. It's responsible for implementing key sections of the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare) and it is grappling with a significant number of cases of identity theft that are projected to cost the country billions in fraudulent refunds if not addressed promptly.

Yet thanks to the forced, across-the-board budget cuts imposed by Congress, the IRS is going to have to close up shop for seven days in 2013, when work will essentially grind to a halt. All of these cuts seem shortsighted, given that the IRS collects 93 percent of all government revenue. Failing to collect what all taxpayers owe leaves the federal budget short about $400 billion per year. More robust funding of the IRS that would allow it to go after more of corporate America's bigger players might help reduce the need for some of the sequester cuts.