Mother Jones
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Among those in attendance last Friday when IRS official Lois Lerner admitted that agency staffers had systematically singled out tea partiers and other conservative groups for special scrutiny was a lawyer named Marcus Owens. Lerner’s admission was shocking, and nobody realized that more than Owens. That’s because he served as director of the Exempt Organizations Division from 1990 to 2000, prior to Lerner holding the job.
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Ex-IRS Director: Tea Party Groups Deserved Scrutiny, But IRS Bungled the Job
Owens, who has worked on tax law issues in private and public practice for almost 40 years, including 25 years at the IRS, says he has been getting a lot of calls about the scandal. The way he sees it, he told me in an interview on Tuesday, is that the IRS was right to take a close look at conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. Particularly in 2010, hundreds of new conservative groups were springing up across the country. “I think that it would be unreasonable to expect the IRS to ignore that, and to simply approve these 501(c)(4) applications from politically active organizations as if they were Scout troops or Little Leagues,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they should be denied exemption or that the evaluation should be overboard or overly intrusive, but there should be special evaluation.”
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Ex-IRS Director: Tea Party Groups Deserved Scrutiny, But IRS Bungled the Job