| Politics Profiling Is Great ... Except When You Do It to Me Will the IRS's scrutiny of Tea Party groups convince conservatives that all kinds of profiling are wrong? By Farhad Manjoo
Posted Monday, May 20, 2013, at 11:04 PM ET  Pretend you work at the Internal Revenue Service. Actually, let's make this exercise even more terrible. Pretend you're an underpaid, low-level clerk working in the understaffed IRS backwater of Cincinnati. Every day, a big stack of files lands on your desk. Every day, the stack gets a little bigger than the last. Each file represents a new application for a certain tax status—501(c)(4), a tax-exempt designation meant for "social welfare" organizations. Nonprofits with this status aren't required to disclose the identity of their donors and they're allowed to lobby legislative officials. The catch is that they must limit their political campaign activity. According to IRS rules, 501(c)(4) groups can participate in elections, but electioneering must not be their "primary" mission. Got all that? Good—now let's get to work. It's your job to decide which 501(c)(4) applications represent legitimate social-welfare organizations, and which ones are from groups trying to hide their campaign activities. What's more, you've got to sort the good from the bad very quickly, as you're being inundated with applications. In 2010, your office received 1,735 applications for 501(c)(4) status. In 2011, the number jumped 30 percent, to 2,265, and in 2012 there was another 50 percent spike, this time to 3,357 applications. So what do you do? You look for a shortcut. Someone at your office notices that a lot of the applications for 501(c ... To continue reading, click here.
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