A Hillbilly Objects to an IRS Audit

Glenn Close and Amy Adams in JD Vance’ Hillbilly Elegy on Netflix

I tell you what, ol’ JD sure has his boxer shorts bunched up somehow.  He’s throwing a full on hissy fit about an IRS audit of a group called The American Accountability Foundation.  AAF is in on the righteous indignation too, but its courting donations instead of votes.  It characterizes the investigation into its 501(c)(3) status as just more proof of a vast left-wing conspiracy:  

Because of our success in frustrating the liberal agenda, the Radical Left is coming after us now. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse pressed the DOJ, IRS, and its 87,000 new IRS agents to target the American Accountability Foundation because we’re defending American rights—and winning. We’ve been hit with a politically motivated IRS investigation to slow us down. This fight is too important to give in, and AAF isn’t backing down.

“And while you are here, please donate,” the website says. In bright black and red colors, a nod to Tom Jones’ (no relation, but he’s the top dog at AAF) alma mater probably.  There’s other stuff on AAF’s website about Obama weaponizing the IRS against the Tea Party, stuff like that.  Pretty good job if you can get it.  But then, so is mine, so I’m not mad at Tom or JD.  Anyway, JD sent a hot letter to Commissioner Werfel last Friday about the whole thing.  He, too, dredges up the ghost of Obama and Lerner in his press release.  Here is some of what his letter says:

In a letter dated September 14, your agency announced its intention to investigate whether AAF “[o]perates in accordance with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.” Underneath the announcement was an implied threat to revoke AAF’s tax-exempt status if the investigation yields sufficient legal grounds. But, to date, the IRS has neither presented any evidence that AAF has failed to observe the requirements of section 501(c)(3) nor explained why AAF may be at risk of failing to observe those requirements.

Without an obvious legal rationale for this enforcement action, many will reasonably suspect a political one. Public reporting suggests that the IRS has been lobbied by Democratic Senators to investigate AAF’s tax-exempt status. And AAF asserts that Democratic interest in the organization’s tax compliance spiked only after the organization published 176 pages of correspondence between Senate Democrats and the administration, in which the IRS was encouraged to target conservative groups.

We do not need to remind you that the AAF audit follows on the heels of an ugly chapter in the IRS’s history, during which the agency unfairly targeted conservative groups for scrutiny on the basis of their views. In 2017, the IRS entered into a consent decree requiring that the agency admit and apologize for “heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays” in the processing of conservative groups’ applications for tax-exempt status. The ensuing scandal, which concerned IRS behavior beginning in the early 2010s, caused the agency’s “top echelons [to be] quickly cleaned out.” And this enforcement action is already drawing comparisons to the previous IRS targeting scandal.

Sheesh.  I hate it when people bring up dirty laundry.  

darryll k. jones