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Originally posted by guohua
reply to post by neo96
She has to Plead the 5th. with all the lies being told and all the deception from this administration under Obamas leadership.
She'd be not only Embarrassed, but she'll never work again, because she would have to give up Obama and Holder and a few other Obama cronies!!!
edit on 21-5-2013 by guohua because: (no reason given)
Originally posted by WeAreAWAKE
She is going to plead the 5th??? WOW...a serious Obama supporter. Doesn't want to offend her God.
reply to post by jiggerj
I mean they are working for us. It's like working for a business owner and being protected from telling him that you didn't mail his monthly insurance payment.
Originally posted by neo96
Originally posted by intrepid
A question. Does she have the right to invoke the 5th?
No one is arguing she doesn't have the right, everyone has the right to plead the fifth, and only the guilty do.
But the particular bias people are angry about is the opposite of the bias they should be angry about. The problem wasn’t that the IRS was skeptical of tea party groups registering as 501(c)4s. It’s that it hasn’t been skeptical of Organizing for America, Crossroads GPS, Priorities USA and Heritage Action Fund registering as 501(c)4s. The IRS should be treating all these groups equally and appropriately — which would mean much more harshly.
Instead, the IRS has permitted 501(c)4s to grow into something monstrous. And if they cower in the aftermath of this embarrassment, it might make matters even worse.
Social welfare organizations have a couple of neat advantages. They’re tax-exempt — which means, in effect, that your tax dollars subsidize them. And thanks to a 1958 court case, they don’t have to disclose their donors.
But they’re not meant to be political. A 2003 IRS document says that “organizations that promote social welfare should primarily promote the common good and general welfare of the people of the community as a whole.” It goes on to give pages and pages of examples. “A corporation organized for the purpose of rehabilitating and placing unemployed persons over a stated age,” for instance. Or “a corporation formed to provide a school district with a stadium.” “A memorial association organized to study and develop methods of achieving simplicity and dignity in funeral and memorial services,” qualifies, as does “an organization that conducts an annual festival centered around regional customs and traditions.”
Nowhere does the IRS mention “an organization formed by top political operatives for the clear and obvious purpose of reelecting or defeating the president.” But that’s what 501(c)4s have become. According to data collected by OpenSecrets.org, 501(c)4s spent $92 million in the 2010 election. They spent $254 million in the 2012 election. That’s a lot of social welfare going to the good people who live in swing states and competitive districts.
Some of the flagged groups did have their tax-exempt status delayed or did face some additional scrutiny, but not a single group has been denied tax-exempt status.
A May 14 draft report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that none of the 296 questionable applicants had been denied, “For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, as of December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles).” (p. 14)
In fact, the only known 501(c)(4) applicant to recently have its status denied happens to be a progressive group: the Maine chapter of Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office. Although the group did no electoral work, and didn’t participate in independent expenditure campaign activity either, its partisan nature disqualified it from being categorized as working for the “common good.”
So, a little more than 2/3rds of applications flagged for processing by specialists were indeed politically-oriented.
Normally, the aforementioned category would disqualify applicants for 501(C)(4) status. But the sheer volume of applicants during and after the 2008 presidential election along with the polarization of the political process in general combined to inhibit the agency's screening ability, allowing those groups to obtain the highly-sought-after 501(C)(4) tax-exempt status. Yes, it's an excuse. It was a bureaucratic failure with "bureaucratic" being the operative term.
But, it wasn't Barack Obama's army of liberal zombies.
Originally posted by tothetenthpower
Originally posted by intrepid
A question. Does she have the right to invoke the 5th?
I believe legally she certainly can.
Maybe it's like out of the movies, where she pleads the 5th cause secretly she's been an informant working with some 3 letter agency doing the investigations?!
Not likely, but, self incrimination is more the thing she wants to avoid I would think.
~Tenthedit on 5/21/2013 by tothetenthpower because: (no reason given)