An annual tradition here at MuckRock, it’s time for the Tax Day Anger Read - because there’s nothing like some righteous indignation to help cure that audit anxiety.
Last year, we looked at offshore accounts, and how corporations use them to save millions of dollars a day in taxes. Today, we’re taking a step back, and looking at the broader issue of IRS FOIA rejections, and how the sense one gets that you’re dealing with an agency that really doesn’t want you to know what it’s doing.
So, here’s an ever-growing list of everything the IRS has determined you don’t have a right to know …
- Their standards for granting non-profit status to media organizations:
- Their training materials for identifying tax cheats …
- The form used by Private Prison giant Corrections Corp to justify why they should be taxed as Real Estate Investment Trust, like a hotel, rather than, say, a prison …
- Memos referencing their infamous clash with Scientology front groups …
- The FOIA requests that those Scientology groups sent during that clash …
- Documents regarding Operation Marco Polo, the multi-agency task force that took down the Silk Road …
- Policies for what they’re going to do with those seized Bitcoins from that Silk Road raid …
- Actually, pretty much anything to do with Silk Road, really …
- Or anything and everything to do with former presidential hopeful Jeb Bush …
- And finally, how many billion-dollar whistleblower claims they didn’t do anything about …
Which, to add insult to injury, was double-secret rejected by citing four separate exemptions and a “neither confirm nor deny.”
So, there you have it - a run-down of some of the most egregious exemptions used by the agency that demands to know if you’ve ever sent a work email from your living room. And just to put this all in perspective …
That’s what an IRS FOIA “release” looks like.
Good luck filing by deadline, don’t spend that refund all in one place!
Image by Geraldshields11 via Wikimedia Commons and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
