Republican Changes To IRS Oversight Of Political Speech Make A Lot Of Sense.

GOP IRS Report: Political Speech Provides Social Welfare

July 30, 2014 by Sam Rolley 

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Representative Darrell Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee discussed its report on the Internal Revenue Service targeting scandal, “Making Sure Targeting Never Happens: Getting Politics Out of the IRS and Other Solutions” on Wednesday.

According to the report, the Oversight Committee “has reviewed approximately 800,000 pages of documents produced by the IRS, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department, the Federal Election Commission, the IRS Oversight Board, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and other custodians.” Based on the findings from the research, Oversight members have come up with a 15-point plan to reform the IRS.

The most important reforms, as summarized by Issa in a press release accompanying the report’s Tuesday release, include:

*Replacing the IRS Commissioner with a multi-member, bipartisan commission

*Removing the IRS as a regulator of political speech for social-welfare groups

*Allowing taxpayers, and not the IRS, to control access to their confidential taxpayer information

*Creating a private right of action for victims of willful and injurious leaks by IRS officials of confidential taxpayer information

*Establishing transparent and objective criteria for scrutiny of applicants

*Establishing clear and transparent rules for information-collecting purposes

*Prohibiting political and policy communications between the IRS and Executive Office of the President

*Removing the IRS from implementation of the Affordable Care Act

Currently, nonprofit status is supposed to be reserved for entities which allocate less than half of resources to “political activities.” The left has already heavily criticized the Issa plan, charging that lawmakers should instead focus primarily on defining what the IRS should consider “political speech,” thereby strengthening agency guidelines for denying nonprofit status.

But in the months since the IRS scandal hit headlines more than a year ago the agency has already attempted and failed to narrow down the definition. Center for Competitive Politics President explained why during Oversight testimony Wednesday.

He said in a prepared statement: “The Internal Revenue Service is primarily a tax collection agency. It knows little about nonprofit advocacy and even less about First Amendment protections for free speech. This incompetence was on clear display when the IRS proposed regulations last November attempting to define political activity, which generated over 150,000 public comments. Organizations and citizens across the political spectrum were nearly unanimous in criticizing the proposal for seeking to regulate too much activity.

“In fairness to the career staff at the IRS, this is extremely difficult work. The tax laws are complicated, but the relationship of campaign finance laws and the First Amendment is even more complex and raises very difficult constitutional issues,” he continued. “This difficulty is one reason why the IRS should not be involved in this type of political regulation.”

Instead of making the political speech definition narrower, supporters of more comprehensive IRS reform support broader protections for nonprofits’ 1^st Amendment activities. The reason for this view, as Issa’s report puts it, is that “activities that promote free political speech and free political assembly benefit the general welfare” because they are American rights.