Tea party groups want Congress to investigate IRS ‘assault’
On Tuesday, Jamie Radtke, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Virginia, asked California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa to investigate what she said was unfair treatment of tea party groups by the Internal Revenue Service. Issa chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Radtke is a former president of the Richmond Tea Party, a group which applied for tax-exempt charitable status in December 2009.
“After waiting two and a half years for approval,” Radtke wrote, “the IRS recently communicated a new set of overly-burdensome and invasive demands for information that exceed the scope of the IRS code.”
Those demands, Radtke said in a press release, included the answers to “12 additional questions in 53 separate parts.” The Richmond Tea Party was also ordered to hand over a list of all its donors and volunteers.
“The IRS,” Radtke added, “states that such information will be made available for ‘public inspection.’”
The Daily Caller has obtained copies of two letters to the organization from the IRS, dated September 10, 2010 and January 9, 2012. The earlier letter contains 17 separate requests for information, including “copies of your materials on Face Book [sic]” and “copies of any sponsorship agreements.”
The more recent letter, which Radtke addressed, does indeed contain 53 additional demands for information before the IRS can designate the group as a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organization.
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