From that arch-Liberal rag, TIME Magazine, May 14, 2013:

The IRS is unpopular on its best days, and the past few have been among its worst. The agency's admission that it targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny drew condemnation from across the political spectrum on Monday. "Outrageous," declared Barack Obama. House and Senate leaders from both parties promised an investigation. Some of the Tea Party groups refused to even accept its apology.

All this outrage threatens to obscure an important point: the IRS does need to crack down on political groups masquerading as social-welfare organizations. Many of the nonprofit groups who claim 501(c)(4) status either flout tax law or flirt with the murky line between electioneering and issue advocacy, all while using their tax-exempt status to conceal their donors. The problem isn't that the IRS flagged nonprofit groups for additional review. The problem is that it did so poorly, lavishing special attention on Tea Party outfits when it should have been scrutinizing everyone — or at least more egregious offenders.

After the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in January 2010, donors flocked to 501(c)(4)s as a vehicle to pump cash into elections without disclosing the source of their contributions [emphasis mine, DF]. The number of groups applying for social-welfare status has since doubled. In 2012, the news outlet ProPublica examined 72 501(c)(4) applications from groups that claimed to have no plans to spend money on elections. They compared those documents against the subsequent tax returns. Nearly half of the groups found their plans had changed.

In last year's elections, 501(c)(4) groups spent more than $300 million in dark money, according to Lisa Rosenberg of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan government-transparency group based in Washington. There is no way to police all these groups, Rosenberg acknowledges. The IRS, was deluged with social-welfare applications at the same time the Tea Party movement was on the rise. "It's the right thing to do to be looking into which of these groups are legitimate social-welfare organizations and which are political organizations. It's absolutely necessary," Rosenberg says. "There's no question the way the IRS apparently went about it was wrong. But the fact that they were doing it is absolutely right."

The method the IRS used to determine which groups to investigate — singling out keywords like tea party, patriot and other conservative terms of art — was "just backwards," says Fred Wertheimer, president of the campaign-finance watchdog Democracy 21. "There are a number of groups that have blatantly been abusing the tax laws in order to hide their donors. Those are the groups that the IRS should have been investigating."

Don Firth