Almost inadvertently, because people there were willing to work for less than elsewhere, Cincinnati became ground zero for nonprofit applications.
For the time being, the checks remained in place. The criteria for flagged nonprofits were still made public. The Continuing Professional Education text was still made public. Saturation reviews and post reviews were still in place.
But by 1998, after hearings in which Republican Senator Trent Lott accused the IRS of "Gestapo-like" tactics, a new law mandated the agency's restructuring. In the years that followed, the agency aimed to streamline. For most of the ‘90s, the IRS had more than 100,000 employees. That number would drop every year, to slightly less than 90,000 by 2012.
Change also came to the Exempt Organizations division.
The IRS tried to remove discretion from lower-level employees around the country by creating rules they had to follow. While the reorganization was designed to centralize power in the agency's Washington headquarters, it didn't work out that way.
"The distance between Cincinnati and Washington was such that soon Cincinnati became a power center," said Streckfus, the former IRS lawyer.
Following reorganization, many highly trained lawyers in Washington who previously handled the most sensitive nonprofit applications were reassigned to focus on special projects, he said.
Owens, who left the IRS in 2000 but stayed in touch with his old division, said the focus on efficiency meant "eliminating those steps deemed unimportant and anachronistic."
In 2003, the saturation reviews and post reviews ended, and the public list of criteria that would get an application referred to headquarters disappeared, Owens said. Instead, agents in Cincinnati could ask to have cases reviewed, if they wanted. But they didn't very often.
"No one really knows what kinds of cases are being sent to Washington, if any," Owens said. "It's all opaque now. It's gone dark."
By the end of 2004, the Continuing Professional Education articles stopped.
Recommendations from an ABA task force for IRS guidelines on social welfare nonprofits and politics that same year were met with silence.
Even the IRS's Political Activities Compliance Initiative, which investigated complaints of charities engaged in politics — primarily churches — closed up shop in early 2009 after less than five years, without any explanation.
Both before and after the changes, the Exempt Organizations division has been a small part of the IRS, which is focused on collecting money and chasing delinquent taxpayers.
89,551 335
Source: IRS Data Books, IRS Exempt Organizations Annual Report
Of the 90,000 employees at the agency last year, only 876 worked in the Exempt Organizations' division, or less than 1 in 1,000 employees.
Of those, 335 worked in the office that actually handles applications of nonprofits.
Most of those — about 300 — worked in Cincinnati, Streckfus estimates. The rest were at headquarters, in Washington D.C.
In Cincinnati, the employees' primary job was sifting through the applications of nonprofits, making determinations as to whether a nonprofit should be recognized as tax-exempt. In a press release Wednesday, the IRS said fewer than 200 employees were responsible for that work.
In 2012, these employees received 60,780 applications. The bulk of those — 51,748 — were from groups that wanted to be recognized as charities.
But the number of social welfare nonprofit applications spiked from 1,777 in 2011 to 2,774 in 2012. It's impossible to say how many of those groups indicated whether they would engage in politics, or why the number of applications increased. The IRS said Wednesday that it "has seen an increase in the number of tax-exempt organization applications in which the organization is potentially engaged in political activity," including both charities and social welfare nonprofits, but didn't specify any numbers.
Source: IRS Data Books
On average, one employee in Cincinnati would be responsible for going through roughly one application per day.
Some would be easy — say, a local soup kitchen. But to evaluate whether a social welfare nonprofit has social welfare as its primary purpose, the agent is supposed to use a "facts and circumstances" test. There is no checklist. Reviewing just one social welfare nonprofit could take days or weeks, to look through a group's website, track down TV ads and so forth.
"You've got 60,000 applications coming through, and it's hard to do that with the number of agents looking at them," said Philip Hackney, who was in the IRS's chief counsel office in Washington between 2006 and 2011 but said he wasn't involved in the Tea Party controversy. "The reality is that they cannot do that, and that's why you're seeing them pick stuff out for review. They tried to do that here, and it burned them."
As we have previously reported, last year the same Cincinnati office sent ProPublica confidential applications from conservative groups. An IRS spokeswoman said the disclosures were inadvertent.
Mark Everson, IRS commissioner for four years during the George W. Bush administration, said he believed the fact that the division is understaffed is relevant, but not an excuse for what happened. "The whole service is under-funded," he pointed out.
And Dan Backer, a lawyer in Washington who represented six of the groups held up because of the Tea Party criteria, said he doesn't buy the notion that low-level employees in Cincinnati were alone responsible.
"It doesn't just strain credulity," Backer said. "It broke credulity and left it laying on the road about a mile back. Clearly these guys were all on the same marching orders."
The inspector general's audit was prompted last year after members of Congress, responding to complaints by Tea Party groups, asked for it.
Like former officials interviewed by ProPublica, the audit suggests that officials at IRS headquarters in Washington were unable to manage their subordinates in Cincinnati. When Lois Lerner, the Exempt Organizations division director in Washington, learned in June 2011 about the improper criteria for screening applications, she instructed that they be "immediately revised."
But just six months later, Cincinnati employees changed the revised criteria to focus on "organizations involved in limiting/expanding government" or "educating on the Constitution." They did so "without executive approval."
"The story people are overlooking is: Congress is complaining about underpaid, overworked employees who are not adequately trained," said Bryan Camp, a former attorney in the IRS chief counsel's office.
In the end, after all the millions of anonymous money spent by some groups to elect candidates in 2012, after all the groups that said in their applications that they would not spend money to elect candidates before doing exactly that, after the Cincinnati office flagged conservative groups, the IRS approved almost all the new applications. Only eight applications were denied.
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