New Breakdown of Groups Targeted by IRS

Among the many mysteries in the IRS scandal has been this basic question: how many of the groups that were targeted for scrutiny were conservative and how many were liberal?

Now there's a new estimate from Republicans on the House Committee on Ways and Means: Of the 298 applications that were collected and put on hold by the Internal Revenue Service between mid-2010 and mid-2012, 248, or 83%, were right-leaning, while 29, or 10%, were left-leaning.

Associated Press

The numbers are of interest because IRS confidentiality rules have prevented all the affected groups from being publicly identified. That's hampered efforts to figure out exactly how many of the groups were conservative, liberal or something else. Ways and Means has been able to gain access to the list because of an exception in the confidentiality rules.

Democrats argue that the presence of some liberal groups in the IRS's net shows that the screening wasn't focused entirely on conservatives. They also point to other screening efforts by the IRS that focused exclusively on liberal groups, and note that some applications by liberal groups were even denied because of too much political involvement.

Republicans say those screening efforts were narrower and less heavy-handed than what the tea-party groups experienced, however. And there's evidence that while scrutiny expanded after mid-2011 to include liberal groups, it began by focusing entirely on tea-party, patriot and other conservative grassroots entities.

Of the right-leaning groups' applications, about 45% have been approved, while about 70% of the left-leaning groups have been approved.

All those numbers are expected to be examined at a Ways and Means hearing on Wednesday afternoon. Republicans also are hoping to open a new line of inquiry, suggesting that conservative tax-exempt groups were disproportionately flagged for follow-on scrutiny and audits by the IRS.

The IRS back in May released a list of the 176 groups that had been approved. At the time, one tax expert, Martin Sullivan of Tax Analysts, said that 46 of those 176 had Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 in their name, 76 were other conservative organizations, 48 were "non-conservative" organizations, and six organizations couldn't be determined.


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