Quote:I can kind of understand why the IRS did what they did. Purely political groups are not entitled to tax exempt status. Regardless of that, the IRS is swamped with requests for tax exempt status by groups that appear to be purely political. So they used a keyword search to try to isolate the cases that they thought should receive more scrutiny. The key words included the words "tea party." Also included in the key word search were the words "patriot," "Israel," "progressive," "occupy," "medical marijuana," and some others. This slowed down the approval process for tea party groups, although none were denied.


So the whole thing might have been just pure bureaucratic bungling; the attempt to create a shortcut by using keywords.


At least, that's the IRS side of the story. At the very least, they used bad judgment. They should have known this could look really bad, and they should have taken steps to insure the process was not just fair, but obviously fair.