A House Investigation Reveals Disturbing IRS Home Visit Practices

 The most unsettling revelations involve a bizarre incident from about a month and a half after my case, on April 25, 2023. On that date, a woman was visited at her home by a man identifying himself as “Bill Haus” from the IRS’s Criminal Division. He then “informed the taxpayer he was at her home to discuss issues concerning an estate for which the taxpayer was the fiduciary,” and after sharing “details about the estate that only the IRS would know,” the taxpayer “let him into her home.”

The woman informed “Haus” that the estate issues had been resolved, and furnished documents to prove it. At this point, he informed her of his real purpose, claiming she was delinquent on several tax filings and provided “several documents to the taxpayer for her to complete.”

Hesitating, the woman offered to put him on the phone with her accountant, but when he didn’t answer the phone, she contacted an attorney, who “repeatedly told Agent ‘Haus’ to leave the taxpayer’s home since the taxpayer had not received any prior notice from the IRS of any issue.” The agent reportedly replied that he was with the IRS and could go into anyone’s house at any time, and before leaving told the taxpayer she had “exactly one week to satisfy the remaining balance or he would freeze all her assets and put a lien on her house,” as the Committee report put it.

1. IRS agents make field visits using aliases;

2. IRS agents make “pretext” visits, i.e. they announce they’re asking about one thing, when really by their own admission, they might be investigating something else;

3. The IRS makes local, covert home visits without informing local authorities.

A major at the MPD called TIGTA to ask how the citizen could file a complaint, and the MPD was told “it would be a waste of her time.” Not until May 4th was the taxpayer able to speak with “Haus’s” supervisor, who confirmed she did not, in fact, owe money. He apologized, saying “some things that were said were wrong . . . things never should have gotten this far.”

The IRS told the Committee weeks later that the case was closed, and a day after that sent a letter explaining that the alias issue was not standard procedure:

An agent shows up at the home of the Twitter files journalist who testified before Congress.

 Democrats are denouncing the House GOP investigation into the weaponization of government, but maybe that’s because Republicans are getting somewhere. That includes new evidence that the Internal Revenue Service may be targeting a journalist who testified before the weaponization committee.

...

The bigger question is when did the IRS start to dispatch agents for surprise house calls? Typically when the IRS challenges some part of a tax return, it sends a dunning letter. Or it might seek more information from the taxpayer or tax preparer. If the IRS wants to audit a return, it schedules a meeting at the agent’s office. It doesn’t drop by unannounced.

The curious timing of this visit, on the heels of the FTC demand that Twitter turn over names of journalists, raises questions about potential intimidation, and Mr. Jordan is right to want to see documents and communications relating to the Taibbi visit.

The fear of many Americans is that, flush with its new $80 billion in funding from Congress, the IRS will unleash its fearsome power against political opponents. Mr. Taibbi deserves to know why the agency decided to pursue him with a very strange house call.

 

Want To Be One Of The New IRS Agents? Here Are The 17 Job Requirements

 

1. Must be a U.S. citizen
2. Minimum education: Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting
3. 5 years of Krav Maga martial arts experience
4. Maintain a level of fitness necessary to perform a chokehold until a tax delinquent is subdued and/or dead
5. Must derive pleasure from human suffering
6. Comfortable with firing squad-style executions
7. Unable to think for yourself
8. Ability to use force lightning preferred but not required
9. Cheered for Agent Smith in The Matrix
10. Must hate children
11. Proficiency in ignoring people who tell you to mind your own business
12. Passionate about auditing Etsy moms selling crafts just trying to make ends meet
13. Fluent in German, goose-stepping experience is a plus
14. Comfortable with firing RPGs at the homes of conservative activists with tax "discrepancies"
15. Previous waterboarding experience
16. Pass a psychological exam to determine if you sympathize with the government while watching Jason Bourne movies
17. Looking for the type that shoots first and does the math later

McCain’s Subcommittee Staff Director Urged IRS to Engage in “Financially Ruinous” Targeting

John McCain hated the Tea Party.

McCain minority staff director Henry Kerner to IRS official Lois Lerner and other IRS officials: “the solution is to audit so many that it becomes financially ruinous”

In the full notes of an April 30 meeting, McCain’s high-ranking staffer Kerner recommends harassing non-profit groups until they are unable to continue operating. Kerner tells Lerner, Steve Miller, then chief of staff to IRS commissioner, Nikole Flax, and other IRS officials, “Maybe the solution is to audit so many that it is financially ruinous.” In response, Lerner responded that “it is her job to oversee it all:”

“The Obama IRS scandal is bipartisan – McCain and Democrats who wanted to regulate political speech lost at the Supreme Court, so they sought to use the IRS to harass innocent Americans,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The Obama IRS scandal is not over – as Judicial Watch continues to uncover smoking gun documents that raise questions about how the Obama administration weaponized the IRS, the FEC, FBI, and DOJ to target the First Amendment rights of Americans.”

Bundy Mistrial Highlights Why the Right Distrusts the Feds

Debra Saunders at Townhall

As Washington conservatives question whether partisan FBI officials working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller have stacked the deck against President Donald Trump, a criminal case in Las Vegas points to the sort of federal prosecutorial abuses that give the right cause for paranoia.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial in the infamous 2014 Bunkerville standoff case against rancher Cliven Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan, and co-defendant Ryan Payne, on the grounds that federal prosecutors improperly withheld evidence.

Conservatives were once unquestioning supporters of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. When it became painfully obvious that many of these agencies are now staffed by the Left, and are willing to use their police powers to punish their political enemies (see the IRS and DOJ), that trust has evaporated. And rightly so.

There are rules designed to create trust that people with police powers,the power of the gun, the power to imprison, will treat the people fairly and equally.  Anything else is oppression.

Did Obama order the release of Trump's tax returns?

Barack Obama has weaponized the IRS.  Beginning with the IRS's vendetta against the Tea Party for which no one paid any price, we now find that your tax records are not safe if you are a threat to Obama and the Democrats.

They leaked Trump's tax records to the NY Times.  In an America of laws this is a crime.  In Obama's America it's business as usual.

IRS chief: Agency encourages illegal immigrant theft of SSNs to file tax returns

This falls into the "I thought this was a headline from The Onion" category.

The IRS is struggling to ensure that illegal immigrants are able to illegally use Social Security numbers for legitimate purposes, the agency's head told senators on Tuesday, without allowing the numbers to be used for "bad" reasons.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen made the statement in response to a question from Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., during a session of the Senate Finance Committee about why the IRS appears to be collaborating with taxpayers who file tax returns using fraudulent information. Coats said that his staff had discovered the practice after looking into agency procedures.

"What we learned is that ... the IRS continues to process tax returns with false W-2 information and issue refunds as if they were routine tax returns, and say that's not really our job," Coats said. "We also learned the IRS ignores notifications from the Social Security Administration that a name does not match a Social Security number, and you use your own system to determine whether a number is valid."

Is there a reason that this crook has not been impeached?

Court rebukes IRS for tea party targeting, orders release of secret list

The Sixty Circuit Court of Appeals is slowly forcing Team Obama to disclose how it successfully blocked its political opponents using the IRS in time for the 2012 election.

The judges ordered the IRS to quickly turn over the full list of groups it targeted so that a class-action lawsuit, filed by the NorCal Tea Party Patriots, can proceed. The judges also accused the Justice Department lawyers, who are representing the IRS in the case, of acting in bad faith — compounding the initial targeting — by fighting the disclosure.

The judges ordered the IRS to quickly turn over the full list of groups it targeted so that a class-action lawsuit, filed by the NorCal Tea Party Patriots, can proceed. The judges also accused the Justice Department lawyers, who are representing the IRS in the case, of acting in bad faith — compounding the initial targeting — by fighting the disclosure.

Judge Kethledge, however, said that turned the law on its head.

“Section 6103 was enacted to protect taxpayers from the IRS, not the IRS from taxpayers,” he wrote.

The lawyer for the Tea Party groups said that they will look at the pattern of investigation as the IRS began its cover-up.

He said they suspect the IRS, aware that the inspector general was looking into the tax agency’s behavior, began adding in other groups to try to muddle the perception that only conservatives were being targeted.

The fix was in: Lois Lerner will walk away scot-free.

It looks like going to trial would have revealed too much about Team Obama corruption.

In a letter Friday, Justice told Congress: “We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution.”

In other words, exactly what President Obama ordered up — er, predicted. Back when the “investigation” had barely started, Obama told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly there wasn’t “even a smidgen of corruption” in the case. On “The Daily Show,” he explained that the “real scandal” is that the IRS lacks the budget to do more audits.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a member of the House Oversight Committee, notes: “Here’s a lady who systematically and for a sustained period of time targeted people for exercising their most fundamental rights, their First Amendment free-speech rights. … The chief investigator, the chief lawyer assigned to the Justice Department to evaluate this, was Barbara Bosserman — a maxed-out contributor to the president’s campaign.”

“So it shouldn’t be any surprise the Justice Department said there’s nothing wrong here. But the American people know that there is.”

IRS’ LOIS LERNER SKATES; AN UGLY PRECEDENT IS SET

The Law: The Justice Department declined to file charges against IRS enforcer Lois Lerner, who singled out Tea Party groups for scrutiny on political grounds. With no accountability, it's now open season on dissidents.

Is there anyone out there subject to an Internal Revenue Service audit or a multiyear delay in approval for tax-exempt status who won't be concerned that the process is politically rigged against them?

That's the message the Justice Department sent when, in a classic Friday night news dump, it decided to not file charges against IRS tax-exempt groups chief Lois Lerner. In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Justice said that while it found "mismanagement, poor judgment and inertia," there was no case for a criminal prosecution.

This is absurd. Lerner was caught red-handed targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups, wrote partisan emails to prove it, then engaged in a massive cover-up effort — with a suspiciously crashed server, an oddly missing BlackBerry and plenty of excuses.

She evaded even more accountability by shielding herself with the Fifth Amendment in Congress. The consequences to her have been . .. retirement on a full pension with all her bonuses to a multimillion-dollar mansion in the deep D.C. suburbs.

As for her victims — and they were many — there is no justice. Now everyone, no matter what their political leanings, will wonder if they too are a political target by an out-of-control agency protected by the Justice Department.

Because that's the real consequence of this failure to hold Lerner accountable: A precedent has been set.

IRS officials now know they can go after any political opponent they want, ruin them any way they wish, swing an election — as occurred with Lerner's actions — and get away with it.

No wonder confidence in government has plunged. Last June, Gallup conducted a survey on confidence in public institutions and found it "below historic norms" and with confidence in justice dropping to its lowest point since Barack Obama took office. Just 23% of the public had high or some confidence in a justice system that could play fairly; 34% had little or no confidence.

The Democrats may giggle with glee at seeing another of their own skate free based on the president's executive actions through his DOJ flunkies.

But two can play that game. If a Republican as unscrupulous as Obama wins the election, the same banana republic politics in government will make Democrats the next victims.

The next GOP president may not be a gentleman of the George W. Bush variety. Political parties should be careful what they wish for.

I see no one on the Republican side who is willing or able to subvert the law to Obama's extent.  That's why the Left is not afraid of retaliation.  

Obama’s pathetic attempt to spin the IRS scandal

The Liar in Chief denies the obvious.  Washington Press Corps averts gaze.

New Docs Reveal DOJ, IRS, and FBI Colluding to Prosecute Obama Opponents

The newly obtained records include an official “DOJ Recap” report detailing an October 2010 meeting between Lois Lerner, DOJ officials and the FBI. The documents also reveal that the Obama DOJ wanted IRS employees who were going to testify to Congress to turn over documents to the DOJ before giving them to Congress.

I have said it before and I'll say it again, the custom of not prosecuting law breaking of officials of previous administrations has to go.  

IRS Created “Special Project Team” of “Hundreds of Lawyers” to Hide Information from Congress

New testimony reveals that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) used “hundreds of attorneys” to hide critical information from Congress’s investigation of the IRS targeting of conservatives.

According to new congressional bombshell testimony today, the IRS set up a previously unknown “special project team” comprised of “hundreds of attorneys,” including the IRS Chief Counsel (one of only two politically appointed positions at the IRS).

The “special project” this team was given? Concealing information from Congress.

The IRS’s director of privacy, governmental liaison, and disclosure division, Mary Howard, testified that soon after the IRS targeting scandal was revealed, the IRS “amassed hundreds of attorneys to go through the documents [requested by Congress] and redact them.”

Members of Congress have long complained that many of the documents produced by the IRS have been “redacted to the point of absurdity.”

Now we know why.

As the Washington Times reports:

Mary Howard, who also works as the head Freedom of Information Act officer in the IRS, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that once the “special project team” was created and operational, she never saw requests for information.

“My understanding was that it started soon after the request came from Congress and other investigators asking for documents around this whole issue,” which she surmised meant around spring of 2013.

In other words, as soon as the IRS targeting scandal broke, the IRS set up a special team of hundreds of attorneys, including President Obama’s political head of the Chief Counsel’s office, to keep requests for publicly available information away from the person who would normally review those documents and turn them over to Congress and the public. That “special” team then overly redacted, delayed, and determined which documents it wanted Congress to see.

Now that it’s been transformed into a political assault team, the IRS is no longer required to comply with the law.

Via Instapundit:

Tax cheats kept jobs at IRS, audit finds.

The IRS fired just two out of every five employees found to be tax cheats over a decade-long span, according to a new federal audit.

Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration found that 1,580 employees willfully violated tax law from October 2003 to September 2013. The IRS was supposed to fire all of those staffers, under a 1998 law.

But the inspector general found that the IRS commissioner saved 960 of them — 61 percent in all — who were instead given counseling, reprimands or suspensions.

There Is No More Doubt: I Have the Proof That Ties Obama and the Democratic Party to the IRS Scandal

Wayne Root was under attack by the Obama IRS and his political opinions were part of the IRS record.  why?  Read about it HERE.

Thousands of new Lerner emails found

An inspector general investigating the IRS’s improper scrutiny of Tea Party groups has found thousands of emails from Lois Lerner, the agency official at the center of that controversy, according to committees involved in the probe.

Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) said it found roughly 6,400 emails either to or from Lerner from between 2004 and 2013 that it didn’t think the IRS had turned over to lawmakers, the congressional committees said. The committees have yet to examine the emails, aides on Capitol Hill said.

The IRS said last year that Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011, leaving it unable to reproduce an untold number of her emails over the prior two years.

We want to see what's in all the "lost" e-mails.

IRS watchdog reveals Lois Lerner missing emails now subject of criminal probe

How stupid does Koskinen think we are?

The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed.

Koskinen refused to apologize to angry Republicans who don’t buy the IRS explanation that a 2011 computer crash may have permanently erased emails from Lois Lerner, the former head of the IRS office accused of improperly holding up applications by conservative groups seeking tax exempt status.

I guess that there has been enough time to "Hoover" the e-mails and remove any incriminating ones

30,000 "lost" Lerner e-mails "found."

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: They will find no smoking gun that definitively ties the White House to the targeting scandal. Those emails — if they ever existed — would have been destroyed long ago. It’s not likely that there is any kind of electronic or paper trail that leads back to the White House. These guys may not be the brightest bulbs in the room, but is there anyone in Washington stupid enough to leave bread crumbs for a prosecutor to follow?

After the manifold the ObamaCare lies, Benghazi, Fast & Furious, and the Gruber tapes does anyone with the brains of a newborn still believe that the Obama administration is even capable of telling the truth?

What are the chance?