- “The IRS Abuse Scandal Keeps Growing” [M.D. Kittle, Reason] Where were the lawyers? [John Steele/Legal Ethics Forum, more, yet more] “IRS Abuses Past and Present” [Chris Edwards, Cato] Allegation: IRS questions to Hawaii Tea Party suggest coordination among probes of conservative nonprofits [Patrick Howley, Daily Caller] Who does more to “delegitimize government”: libertarian critics, or government itself? [Ben Boychuk, Sacramento Bee]
- If you’re looking to gain quick approval of your IRS application, try these #safec4names from Twitter: Club For Civility and Bringing Criticism of Our President Under Reasonable Control [@david_m_wagner], Reject Those Voices [Michael Cannon], Not the Tea Party You Are Looking For [@FricosisGuy], Hollywood Helps! [Dale King]. My own contributions: Grateful Taxpayers for Public Investment and Working Americans Against Wingnut Scandal-Mongering.
- “Expert” Reports in George Zimmerman Case Disclosed [Jeralyn Merritt, TalkLeft; Radley Balko]
- Texas judge: kick partner out of your home or lose your kids [Dallas Voice]
- Socialist Venezuela government blames “excessive demand,” not price controls, for toilet paper shortage [Guardian]
- Even MADD, NHTSA haven’t backed NTSB’s idea of dropping BAC limit to .05 [Bloomberg via @radleybalko]
- “The dumb war on political intelligence” [Jack Shafer]
Tagged as:
alcohol,
child custody,
Martin-Zimmerman case,
taxes
- After Gov. Martin O’Malley signs one of nation’s most restrictive gun laws, Beretta says it intends to move out of state [Guns.com]
- Unfortunately, high cigarette taxes promote this sort of thing: “Ocean City cigarette smuggling ring had ties to terror groups, police say” [Baltimore Sun, Tax Foundation]
- Responding to critics (such as), legislature caps the vessel excise tax in hopes of reviving ailing boating industry [Annapolis Gazette]
- New law backed by O’Malley will require educators to pay dues to teachers’ union whether members or not [Trey Kovacs, Open Market and Workplace Choice; Harford County Dagger]
- State has among nation’s highest per capita medical malpractice outlays, behind only five Northeastern states (NY, PA, NJ, MA, CT) and D.C. [Diederich analysis of annual payouts via TortsProf]
- Chronicle of Rogues: Maryland gets a D minus, ranking a dismal 40th among the 50 states, on corruption-rating State Integrity Report Card [Center for Public Integrity via Tom Coale]
- It’ll be held in D.C. this year rather than Annapolis, but that’s no reason you shouldn’t join us for the acclaimed Cato University [Jul. 28-Aug. 2]
- Politicos scramble to defend “correctional officers’ bill of rights” after FBI affidavit blasts measure for helping entrench corruption at Baltimore jail [AP, earlier]
Tagged as:
guns,
Maryland,
taxes,
tobacco
- As Ezra Klein says IRS furor has nowhere to go, more and more keeps tumbling out [Althouse, Examiner, flashback, Chronicle of Philanthropy, MSNBC video, WaPo, WSJ ("Higher-Ups Knew of IRS Case"), Kim Strassel/WSJ]
- Background: partisans on both sides have taken shifting positions of convenience on whether nonprofit political advocacy is abuse of the tax laws or free speech worthy of protection [Dave Weigel] Now if only the IRS would stop behaving like one of the partisans [Scott Walter, NY Post] Ideas for reform [Conor Friedersdorf]
- “A note on 501 (c)4 corporations” [Coyote] Paul Caron/TaxProf latest daily link roundup;
- Apologia for Service’s misconduct does no credit to New Republic or Noam Scheiber [Nick Gillespie]
- Echoing my post of yesterday, Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy seeks to distinguish between political affiliations of IRS personnel that have some arguable relevance to the scandal, and those that really seem like stretching;
- If you missed it: Cato video, “The I.R.S. Abusing Americans is Nothing New.”
Tagged as:
politics,
scandals,
taxes
For all with eyes to see (except maybe some folks at The New Yorker) the IRS scandal has been hiding in plain sight for more than a year, I argue in a new Cato post. For example, this site briefly covered the Service’s ridiculously broad documentary demands on Tea Party groups — for things like transcripts of speeches and radio shows and the contents of Facebook and Twitter postings– in March and May of last year.
The Treasury Inspector General’s report on the affair, released yesterday, is here. (Coverage roundup: Paul Caron, TaxProf.) It makes clear that many groups were singled out because of their controversial political stances and then subjected to both objectively unreasonable document demands (e.g., for thousands of pages of documentation) and objectively unreasonable delays (e.g., for two years) in resolving their applications. (The Service seldom if ever actually denied applications from the singled-out groups, perhaps because its actions would then have come under more rigorous court review). Meanwhile, other groups with controversial views of a different political valence were waved through. It is not a question of whether applications for tax exemption should somehow be “approved without question,” as some have contended, but whether they should come under review that is even-handed and with no more delay and regulatory burden than is inherent to the process. At Time, Michael Scherer collects past examples that suggest IRS retaliation against political adversaries is something of a tradition in America. (Similarly: Cato video podcast).
P.S. Defending itself against the Inspector General’s report, the IRS says the applicants flagged for special scrutiny “included organizations of all political views.” It points to three such left-leaning groups — out of 471 in all singled out for extra screening. [Bloomberg via Newser] Much more: Gregory Korte, USA Today (“As applications from conservative groups sat in limbo, groups with liberal-sounding names had their applications approved … the liberal groups applied for the same tax status and were engaged in the same kinds of activities as the conservative groups.”) Meanwhile, L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik is unafraid of going way out on a limb to defend what the Service did: if you don’t want to be harassed for your dissidence, it seems, you shouldn’t have sought (c)(4) status in the first place.
Yet more: Reuters has illuminating coverage of how the Service tried to break one of the year’s biggest stories on a Friday afternoon via a friendly question before a room full of tax lawyers. (“They made a bet that this would be the quietest way to roll it out,” [Eric Dezenhall] said of the IRS strategy. “It didn’t work.”) “Did Citizens United Critics Push the Agency To Misbehave?” asks my Cato colleague John Samples, while Tim Lynch adduces “Some Empirical Evidence of IRS Political Manipulation”. The BBC has a lexicon of political scandal euphemisms (“tired and emotional,” “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” etc.)
Tagged as:
scandals,
taxes,
WO writings
…such as harass our political enemies [Michael Cannon, Cato, more; Washington Post on revelations that the Internal Revenue Service applied extra tax scrutiny to groups that "criticize how the country is being run".]
Update: that “just a rogue field office in Cincinnati” story didn’t last long. AP is reporting that the agency’s acting head knew nearly a year ago that tea party groups were being targeted, a fact that might have been of interest to lawmakers pursuing constituent reports of overly onerous document demands from the IRS (see our earlier coverage of that here and here). Meanwhile, ProPublica, the generally liberal-leaning journalistic outfit, has disclosed that the IRS shared with it confidential data from nine conservative-leaning nonprofits.
Tagged as:
Barney Frank,
taxes
“Young New Yorkers would not be able to buy cigarettes until they were 21, up from the current 18, under a proposal advanced [last month] by Dr. Thomas A. Farley, the city’s health commissioner, and Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker.” [New York Times via J.D. Tuccille] Or at least would not be able to buy them legally: according to estimates from the Mackinac Institute, New York state already has the nation’s highest rate of smuggled cigarette consumption, at more than 60 percent of its total market. [Catherine Rampell, NYT; Mackinac; Tax Foundation; Christopher Snowdon, "The Wages of Sin Taxes" (CEI, PDF)]
More: As the legal drinking age has been pushed upward in recent years, the average age of first use of alcohol has fallen markedly [Tuccille]
Tagged as:
alcohol,
NYC,
taxes,
tobacco
Back to the gravel walk? A new environmental program pressures populous Maryland counties to levy assessments on property owners based on their square footage of impervious surfaces such as roofs, patios or driveways that prevent rainwater from sinking into the soil [Blair Lee, Gazette; Maryland Reporter; Frederick News-Post; Anne Arundel County]
P.S. While some of the Maryland commentary has treated the idea as new and experimental, thanks to commenters for pointing out that it’s already a familiar part of the scene elsewhere.
Tagged as:
environment,
Maryland,
real estate,
taxes
Mark Graber at Concurring Opinions, reviewing James Fleming and Linda McClain, Ordered Liberty, a book which lays out a constitutional analysis consistent with the viewpoint Graber calls “Solid Liberalism”:
Another point where Ordered Liberty threatens but pulls back from challenging core Solid Liberal beliefs occurs during the discussion of Bob Jones v. United States. Ordered Liberty suggests that the Supreme Court in that case correctly ruled that religious organizations can be denied tax exemptions if they teach racism and other abhorrent doctrines. I confess to be troubled by the analysis. I suspect that most Jewish schools at the very least encourage students to date and marry other Jews, that these schools teach the doctrine that Jews are a chosen people, and that a great many other religions engage in similarly illiberal teaching. Given the importance of the welfare state in the lives of most citizens, a point Fleming and McClain make elsewhere in the book, I confess to some discomfort with the constitutional rule they eventually endorse that forbids religious coercion but permits religious groups to be denied state benefits that go to other religious groups with more liberally accepted beliefs. I think based on what the authors suggest elsewhere in the book, a case can be made that Bob Jones ought to be rethought.
Tagged as:
churches,
colleges and universities,
discrimination law,
taxes
- After being slapped down by courts, EEOC concentrates on filing fewer but bigger cases [Sue Reisinger, Corporate Counsel] EEOC scores in Cintas, UPS cases [Legal Times]
- SCOTUS grants certiorari in retaliation mixed motives case [University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, SCOTUSBlog via Marcia McCormick, Workplace Prof]
- False Claims Act could be potent weapon for discrimination plaintiffs [Texas Law Review student note by Ralph Mayrell, PDF via Bagenstos]
- Religious liberty compatible with gay rights so long as ambitions of anti-discrimination law aren’t allowed to run wild [Eugene Volokh as part of UCLA conference on Roe's 40th and Lawrence's 10th anniversary] Case of Ocean Grove, N.J. pavilion is still regularly cited as infringement on church autonomy, but it’s not that simple, since it hinges on untypical “public use” covenant of property in question [Box Turtle Bulletin]
- For a more genuine menace to religious liberty, however, watch out for the notion of taking the Bob Jones University precedent — in which courts upheld the stripping of an educational institution’s tax exemption due to its backward racial views — and extending it into a weapon for denying tax exemption to the much broader class of institutions said to contravene “fundamental public policy” [Caroline Maia Corbin, Concurring Opinions]
- More on the deaf lifeguard case [Jon Hyman, earlier]
- New York Gov. Cuomo seeks one-way fee awards in state bias cases [Reuters]
Tagged as:
Andrew Cuomo,
discrimination law,
EEOC,
qui tam,
same-sex marriage,
taxes
I’m in this morning’s New York Post with an opinion piece about the thoroughgoing debacle the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) got itself into with a decade-long lawsuit charging mistreatment of elephants at the Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Circuses (earlier). Last month ASPCA agreed to pay Ringling’s owner $9.3 million to settle charges of litigation abuse. Other defendants in the countersuit, including the Humane Society of the U.S., have declined to settle and remain in the litigation.
Later in the piece I draw a parallel to the recently dismissed Hudson Farm litigation in Maryland, in which a judge lambasted Waterkeeper Alliance for shoddy litigation conduct in a Clean Water Act suit. Is it worth rethinking the whole policy, which dates back to 1970, of broad tax deductibility for suing people in “cause litigation”? Related from Ted Frank at Point of Law.
P.S. The comments section on the Post piece is more substantive than most, and includes a statement from HSUS. (& response from ASPCA head)
Tagged as:
animal rights,
taxes,
WO writings
- Congress acts to squelch bounty-hunting suits over lack of fee stickers on bank ATMs [Kevin Funnell, Alexander Cohen/Atlas Society, earlier here and here]
- Because I would not stop for Tax/He kindly stopped for me [John Carney on Dec. 31 death incentive]
- Having signed up six-year-old client, lawyer files $100 million claim in Sandy Hook massacre [CT News Junkie; another of Mr. Pinsky's publicity-related endeavors]
- One list (among many) of the craziest US lawsuits of 2012 [Samantha Rollins, The Week]
- “Sue to silence the NRA? Wind up paying its legal fees, more likely.” [@andrewmgrossman on this diary of a (would-be) speech-suppressing litigant] When some politicians aren’t bashing gunmakers, they’re shoveling money at them [Matt Welch on New York; my Reason piece a way back on Connecticut] “Should People Be Forced To Buy Liability Insurance For Their Guns?” [Megan McArdle]
- Also re: Newtown, “Laws made in the shadow of tragedy normally look odd to the healed mind.” [Tom Coale, HoCo Rising] And Radley Balko last year, via @amyalkon, on why “Laws named after crime victims and dead people are usually a bad idea.” [HuffPo]
- Could ubiquity of cellphones help explain plunge in crime rate? [ABA Journal on study by Klick et al]
Tagged as:
banks,
Connecticut,
crime and punishment,
guns,
taxes
- L.A. County assessor, though in jail, will keep drawing $197K salary plus raise [LAT]
- IRS lowers the regulatory boom on tax preparers [Institute for Justice video, auto-plays]
- On Wal-Mart Mexico bribery, NYT has a bit of a blind eye of its own [Stoll; earlier here, here, etc.]
- Another painful CPSIA regulation: CPSC on testing “representative samples” [Nancy Nord]
- “Popcorn lung” couple “won a $20 million judgment. Now, they’re broke.” [ABC]
- From Todd Zywicki: Libertarianism, Law and Economics, and the Common Law [SSRN via Bainbridge]
- If the courts disapprove of throttling internet speeds, what do they think of throttling class action claims redemption rates? [Ted Frank]
Tagged as:
class action settlements,
CPSC,
CPSIA,
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,
Los Angeles,
taxes,
Wal-Mart
According to the retailers group [Illinois Retail Merchants Association], Mr. [Stephen] Diamond’s Chicago law firm, Schad Diamond & Shedden P.C., has filed no fewer than 238 lawsuits in recent years against retailers small and large, which in its view failed to collect said shipping-and-handling sales taxes. Since the suits have been filed under a “whistle-blower” section of law, the firm is entitled to as much as 30 percent of any recovered taxes as well as attorneys’ fees for its trouble. And because it’s often easier and cheaper for defendants to settle rather than continue to fight, Schad Diamond reportedly has pocketed millions of dollars.
The office of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan says the whistleblower provisions were intended for use by insiders disclosing misconduct rather than by outsiders, while “Illinois Revenue Director Brian Hamer says [the wave of suits] ‘has given Illinois a black eye’ and victimizes those who have made only an ‘inadvertent’ mistake.” [Greg Hinz, Crain's Chicago Business]
Tagged as:
Chicago,
Illinois,
taxes,
whistleblowers
Taking advantage of the media bubble arising from the announced shutdown of Hostess snack-cake operations, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is back with a bill proposing to deny the deduction as ordinary business expenses of money spent advertising kids’ snacks. Kay Bell and Kelly Phillips Erb apply deserved ridicule (via Paul Caron/TaxProf).
Plus: Baylen Linnekin on Denmark’s planned repeal of a pioneering fat tax (earlier) and the rejection by voters in two California cities of soda taxes.
Tagged as:
advertising,
obesity,
taxes
- Forfeiture: “Defend the Right to Carry Cash and Travel Unmolested” [Eapen Thampy, Agitator]
- Recent Japanese racketeering law, unlike our RICO, actually focuses on organized crime [Adelstein]
- Sheriff’s flack to Fiona Apple: shut up and sing [Ken at Popehat]
- Jimenez case: 99-year sentence, “substantial likelihood defendant was not guilty of this offense” [Jacob Sullum]
- Conrad Black continues to speak out on barbarities of “prosecutocracy” [NY Sun]
- “Are whistle-blowers the new IRS business model?” [Victor Fleischer, NYT DealBook]
- “Minnesota Farmer Found ‘Not Guilty’ in Raw Milk Case” [Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason]
- Utah man shoots neighbor he thinks “telepathically raped” his wife, is ruled mentally fit for trial [CBS]
Tagged as:
forfeiture,
Japan,
prosecutorial abuse,
taxes,
whistleblowers
At Prawfsblawg, Paul Horwitz, Rick Garnett and others have a discussion of claims (typified here and here) that it’s oppressive not to let churches electioneer with tax-deductible funds. Other views: Religion News Service/HuffPo, Bloomberg editorial, Stephen Colbert via TaxProf (to an IRS-defying pastor: “Other people have to use after-tax money for their political speech, but you guys get to use pre-tax money for political speech.”) Or is the better answer to liberate both secular and religious 501(c)(3)s to express election views, with the possible result of enabling political donors generally to take a tax deduction on money spent to promote their preferred candidates and causes?
Tagged as:
churches,
politics,
taxes
