March 20, 2000 | Read Time: 3 minutes
A key Congressional committee has concluded that the Internal Revenue Service has not unfairly singled out conservative non-profit organizations for audits or other actions.
The Joint Committee on Taxation’s three-year review followed news reports in 1997 that the I.R.S. was examining several non-profit groups that were conservative or had opposed Clinton administration policies. Some non-profit organizations, political figures, and newspaper editorials had questioned whether the revenue service had put right-of-center groups under special scrutiny.
The I.R.S. denied the charges, but key Republican and Democratic members of Congress asked for an investigation by the staff members of the Joint Committee on Taxation, which scrutinizes tax matters for the House and Senate.
In a 163-page report, the committee said it found “no credible evidence that tax-exempt organizations were selected for examination, or that the I.R.S. altered the manner in which examinations of tax-exempt organizations were conducted, based on the views espoused by the organizations or individuals related to the organizations.”
What’s more, the report said it found “no credible evidence of intervention by Clinton Administration officials (including Treasury Department and White House officials) in the selection of (or the failure to select) tax-exempt organizations for examination.”
The committee discovered evidence that Clinton administration officials twice appeared to have made “non-routine contacts” with I.R.S. employees in seeking private information about tax-exempt organizations.
In one instance, the report said, White House officials tried to find out about the status of “certain forms filed by members of a tax-exempt group,” in violation of written White House policies, but they were rebuffed by I.R.S. workers.
News accounts have identified the inquires as coming from aides to Vice President Al Gore who were seeking information about a labor union. In the other case, a Treasury Department official allegedly asked the I.R.S. about the status of an audit of a specific tax-exempt group, which led a “concerned” tax agency employee to alert the revenue service’s Office of Inspection.
Citing federal privacy law, the joint committee did not identify any of the tax-exempt organizations involved in its study.
The report also found a number of problems with the I.R.S.’s handling of cases involving tax-exempt organizations, including “significant delays” in how the agency’s national office processes certain rulings requested by field offices. “These delays contributed to a perception that the I.R.S. was not treating all tax-exempt organizations consistently,” the report said.
The joint committee’s report met with criticism by some.
Joseph Farah, who was executive director of the Western Journalism Center, charged three years ago that his charity was being audited because it had supported a project that focused on a possible Clinton administration cover-up in the death of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster.
Last week, Mr. Farah branded the joint committee’s report as a “whitewash” that was not based on the evidence. Mr. Farah analyzed the report in an essay posted on WorldNetDaily.com, a news organization that Mr. Farah now edits.
The full text of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s report may be found on the committee’s Web site at http://www.house.gov/jct/pubs00.html.
