Editorials: There Is No Good Fix for the IRS Tea Party Problem | Josh Barro/Bloomberg

My colleagues Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas wrote about the Internal Revenue Service’s Tea Party scandal this morning:

The IRS does need some kind of test that helps them weed out political organizations attempting to register as tax-exempt 501(c)4 social welfare groups. But that test has to be studiously, unquestionably neutral.

That’s a nice thought. But is such a test even possible? The IRS didn’t make this mess because its employees are stupid or because they have a political vendetta. It’s because they’ve been given an impossible task: figure out which organizations have missions that are “primarily political” — and come up with definitions for “primarily” and “political” that are neither vague nor politically charged.

National: Wider Problems Found at IRS | Wall Street Journal

The Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of conservative groups went beyond those with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names—as the agency admitted Friday—to also include ones worried about government spending, debt or taxes, and even ones that lobbied to “make America a better place to live,” according to new details of a government probe. The investigation also revealed that a high-ranking IRS official knew as early as mid-2011 that conservative groups were being inappropriately targeted—nearly a year before then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told a congressional committee the agency wasn’t targeting conservative groups. Tax-exempt groups organized under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code are allowed to engage in some political activity, but the primary focus of their efforts must remain promoting social welfare.

National: I.R.S. Apologizes to Conservative Groups Over Application Audits | New York Times

The Internal Revenue Service apologized to Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations on Friday for what it now says were overzealous audits of their applications for tax-exempt status. Lois Lerner, the director of the I.R.S. division that oversees tax-exempt groups, acknowledged that the agency had singled out nonprofit applicants with the terms “Tea Party” or “patriots” in their titles in an effort to respond to a surge in applications for tax-exempt status between 2010 and 2012. She insisted that the move was not driven by politics, but she added, “We made some mistakes; some people didn’t use good judgment. For that we’re apologetic,” she told reporters on a conference call.

National: The IRS’s big admission: What it means | The Washington Post

The Internal Revenue Service dropped a bombshell on the political world Friday morning, acknowledging that it inappropriately targeted conservative political groups in the 2012 campaign, subjecting them to additional screening in their applications for tax-exempt status. An IRS official told the Associated Press that low-level staff unjustly focused on groups with words like “tea party” and “patriot” in their name, and the groups were asked for donor information, likely in violation of IRS policy. The news was met with a healthy dose of I-told-you-so from the conservative and tea party communities, which have long been pitted against the IRS and have in the past accused it of just such politically inappropriate behavior.

National: GOP reaction in IRS case spurs calls for probe, apology | USAToday

President Obama should apologize for the admission by the IRS that it singled out conservative Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny as they applied for non-profit status, Republican members of Congress said Sunday. They also called for an investigation of the agency. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said the IRS actions were “truly outrageous” and “chilling” on CNN’s State of the Union. A public apology was “absolutely” needed, Collins said. “I think that it’s very disappointing the president hasn’t personally condemned this and spoken out. … (T)he president needs to make it crystal clear that this is totally unacceptable in America.”

National: IRS kept shifting targets in tax-exempt groups scrutiny: report | Reuters

When tax agents started singling out non-profit groups for extra scrutiny in 2010, they looked at first only for key words such as ‘Tea Party,’ but later they focused on criticisms by groups of “how the country is being run,” according to investigative findings reviewed by Reuters on Sunday. Over two years, IRS field office agents repeatedly changed their criteria while sifting through thousands of applications from groups seeking tax-exempt status to select ones for possible closer examination, the findings showed. At one point, the agents chose to screen applications from groups focused on making “America a better place to live.” Exactly who at the IRS made the decisions to start applying extra scrutiny was not clear from the findings, which were contained in portions of an investigative report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).