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BREAKING: House GOP to File Criminal Charges Against Lois Lerner in IRS Scandal 

H/T Gateway Pundit

Under Trump The IRS Switches Targets

Obama weaponized the IRS against Christians and conservatives.  Trump has hopefully begun to turn the IRS around so they will actually go after people for their illegal actions and not their beliefs.

President Trump's executive order on travel may be generating big protests, but an IRS missive on travel and passports may not go down too well either. More than a year ago, in H.R.22, Congress gave the IRS a new weapon to collect taxes. Tax code Section 7345 is labeled, “Revocation or Denial of Passport in Case of Certain Tax Delinquencies.” The law isn't limited to criminal tax cases, or even cases where the IRS thinks you are trying to flee. The idea of the law is to use travel as a way to enforce tax collections. It was proposed and rejected in 2012. But by late 2015, Congress passed it and President Obama signed it.

[...]Here is the new information from the IRS. Seriously delinquent tax debt is an individual's unpaid, legally enforceable federal tax debt totaling more than $50,000 (including interest and penalties, but subject to an inflation adjustment) for which:

• A notice of federal tax lien has been filed and all administrative remedies under IRC § 6320 have lapsed or been exhausted or
• A levy has been issued.

More here.

Government Gone Feral

What good is bad, what's bad is good. Deny benefits to our nation's bravest, open the taxpayers' coffers to law breakers violating our borders and make sure that the people who collect these revenues are not held accountable.

The IRS refused to fire most of its own employees found to be cheating on their taxes — and in some cases even quickly turned around and promoted them within the year, according to a new audit released Wednesday.

In about 60 percent of cases of “willful violations” IRS managers found mitigating circumstances and refused to fire the employees, even though the law calls for that penalty. In some of those cases the managers didn’t even document why they’d overridden the penalty, said Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George.

“Given its critical role in Federal tax administration, the IRS must ensure that its employees comply with the tax law in order to maintain the public’s confidence,” Mr. George said. “Willful violation of the law by IRS employees should not be taken lightly, and the IRS Commissioner should fully document decisions made to retain employees whom management has proposed be terminated.”

During the decade from 2004 to 2013, the IRS identified nearly 130,000 potential cases of tax violations by its own employees, and concluded about 10 percent of those were actual violations.

And let's not forget to target conservative organizations with punative actions while ignoring the administration's politically favored allies.

IRS Commissioner, We Can't Abolish The IRS

The IRS commissioner on Tuesday brushed aside GOP proposals to abolish his agency, insisting the U.S. would have to have a tax collector one way or another.

“You can call them something other than the IRS if that made you feel better,” the agency’s chief, John Koskinen, said after a speech at the National Press Club.

Story here.

Pull The IRS's Fangs

The government is pissing away money as fast as it prints it and this clown at the IRS wants more money so he can hire more thieves and bullies to collect more money. Typical government in action.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said Tuesday that service at his agency has gotten so bad that they are ignoring more than 60 percent of taxpayers’ phone calls during this tax season.

Speaking at the National Press Club, Mr. Koskinen pleaded with more money, saying a budget boost would help them staff their overwhelmed customer service lines. He also said it would help reverse staffing cuts in their compliance division, where he said the government will lose $2 billion this year in money it would otherwise have been able to collect if it had better staffing.

Congress has cut or held the agency’s funding static for several years now, with lawmakers deeming the agency recalcitrant in solving problems, and unrepentant for having targeted tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny.

If Congress would stop passing complicated revenue laws that favor special interests and deep pocket political donors and simplify the tax code, they would collect more money. I pay an accountant to do my taxes just so the IRS leaves me the hell alone.

Last year the IRS went after me for another $1,500 in taxes. My accountant looked at the letter, looked at my return, said, "They're idiots" and sent them a letter explaining that I filed exactly the same as I did the previous year and they're not making sense. The IRS backed off. I wonder how many people are intimidated by these tactics and just pay up.

The best way to kill an unrepentant, out of control agency, is not to feed it. Hopefully that is what Congress will continue to do. Starve the IRS into a mere shadow of itself.

Since 2000, the number of IRS employees has declined by 2.6%, from 97,074 to 94,516. Other than Congress, the IRS has the lowest public approval rating than any other US governmental entity.

About seven years ago the IRS wouldn't send me my federal tax over payment - a little over $1,000. I spent over six hours on the phone, two hours a day for three days, trying to get someone to give me an answer. Starve the bastards.


Story here.

Lois Lerner's Files Have Always Been There

From the National Review:

A Justice Department official admitted that former IRS official Lois Lerner’s apparently missing e-mails actually exist on a backup server, but the government doesn’t plan to retrieve them.

“A Department of Justice attorney told a Judicial Watch attorney on Friday that it turns out the federal government backs up all computer records in case something terrible happens in Washington and there’s a catastrophe, so the government can continue operating,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Fox News’s Shannon Bream.

“But it would be too hard to go get Lois Lerner’s e-mails from that backup system,” Fitton continued, paraphrasing the DOJ official. “So, everything we’ve been hearing about scratched hard drives, about missing e-mails of Lois Lerner, other IRS officials, other officials in the Obama administration, it’s all been a pack of malarkey. They could get these records, but they don’t want to.”

Fitton said his group plans to ask a federal judge to order the IRS to hand over the e-mails, which conservative opponents of Lerner want to see in order to determine if there is a link between President Obama’s team and the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups.

“If this backup system is working, Lois Lerner’s e-mails are there,” Fitton said.

Oft times I have to request backups/data recoveries for a system that services over 4,000 users. Almost all large scale backup systems are automated. It should not take very long to retrieve those files.

The IRS has been lying out it's ass.

Emails saved on the backup server are what put Ollie North in hot water. Emails never really go away.

IRS Caught Between A Rock And A Hard Judge

From Legal Insurrection:

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the following statement in response to today’s order from Judge Emmet G. Sullivan regarding the recently “lost” emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials, which were the subject of longstanding Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. IRS (No. 1:13-cv-1559)):

In an extraordinary step, U. S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan has launched an independent inquiry into the issue of the missing emails associated with former IRS official Lois Lerner. 

Previously, Judge Sullivan ordered the IRS to produce sworn declarations about the IRS email issue by August 11. Today’s order confirms Judicial Watch’s read of this week’s IRS’ filings that treated as a joke Judge Sullivan’s order. 

Judge Sullivan, in his earlier ruling, appointed Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola to manage and assist in discussions between Judicial Watch and the IRS about how to obtain any missing records from other sources. Magistrate Facciola is an expert in e-discovery, and authorized Judicial Watch to submit a request for limited discovery into the missing IRS records after September 10.

House Resolution Submitted To Arrest Lois Lehrer

From Gateway Pundit:

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) announced on Thursday that has filed a resolution directing the House sergeant-at-arms to “arrest Lois Lerner for contempt” over theIRS targeting scandal. 

Stockman said in a statement that asking the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute Lerner for “admittedly illegal activity” is a “joke.” Instead, the Republican said it is up to the U.S. House to “uphold the rule of law and hold accountable those who illegally targeted American citizens for simply having different ideas than the President.” 

Under the proposed resolution, Lerner would be held in a Washington, D.C., jail and would be given access to an attorney and all her constitutional rights. 

“It’s time to for House to stop tacitly endorsing this administration’s illegal activity by refusing to hold him accountable,” Stockman said. “I expect Democrats to defend and even praise criminal activity. The question is whether Republican leadership will join them in mocking the House and breaking the law.” 

Contempt of Congress is an actual criminal offense and the Supreme Court has previously upheld the right of Congress to hold people in contempt and even imprison them, the New York Times reported.

That's How You Do It

The FBI has 80,000 emails taken from company email servers

Rupert Murdoch faces trouble on both sides of the Atlantic today following claims the FBI has 80,000 News Corp emails in their possession while a corporate probe into the company continues to gather pace.

According to reports, the FBI has copies of at least 80,000 emails - all of which are said to have been taken from the servers at News Corp, Mr Murdoch's parent company, in New York.

The messages were not included in evidence submitted during the British phone hacking trial - and so could not be reported until the jury reached its verdicts, it is claimed.

Yet the IRS insists that months of email messages were"accidentally" destroyed when Lois Lerner's hard drive crashed. I don't know of  any corporate email system that stores or archives emails on the users' PC. It is just unworkable.  These files are maintained on servers and if the server crashes then there is backup software that is used to restore it. The IRS has an IT budget of over $1.2 billion a year and they can't do this?

IT professionals must be having a major fit over this ridiculous claim, and they are:

Were Lois Lerner’s allegedly lost emails actually destroyed? An Ohio-based trade association, the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers (IAITAM), isn’t so sure, and they don’t find IRS commissioner Koskinen’s explanation of their loss very plausible.

IAITAM administers internationally accepted certifications for information technology professionals. According to the group’s standards, if Lerner’s supposedly malfunctioning hardware was properly destroyed, there would be records of it.

Anytime I dispose of IT equipment in my office I need to complete a disposition sheet indicating the make, model and serial number of the item, it's location and whether or not it is still functioning. Granted, I only manage a little over 100 users in my office but our county domain covers about 4,000 users and the same standards apply to all office managers.

Having been trained in digital forensics (I set up the county crime lab's computer forensics section years ago) I also know there are ways to obtain information from a malfunctioning hard drive. There is highly specialized equipment  and software (i.e., EnCase is where I received my certification) available. To believe that all the resources of the federal government were inadequate for his task as the IRS maintains is beyond the pale. There must be hundreds, if not thousands of certified federal computer forensic examiners who would be able to retrieve this information.

If the IRS wanted to get into the storage media of a company that was accused of  tax evasion, you can bet your bottom dollar that this conversation would not be taking place.