IRS Tracked Taxpayers Political Affiliation

[kpete]

IRS tracked taxpayers’ political affiliation

The News Tribune
Published: January 6th, 2006 02:30 AM


WASHINGTON – As it hunted down tax scofflaws, the Internal Revenue Service collected information on the political party affiliations of taxpayers in 20 states.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of an appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the IRS, said the practice was an “outrageous violation of the public trust” that could undermine the agency’s credibility.

IRS officials acknowledged that party affiliation information was routinely collected by a vendor for several months. They told the vendor last month to screen the information out.


According to Murray’s office, the 20 states in which the IRS collected party affiliation information were Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin.

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/5440902p-4912739c.html

[Coastie for Truth]

1. Wasn't this a charge against Nixon? NT

[lostnfound]

2. Kicked & Recommended. I've been wondering when this would happen.

Exactly the type of abuse this administration would engage in. UFB.

[texpatriot2004]

3. Texas, of course nm

[txindy]

13. That's because we're so special.

:eyes:

They just want to harass every Democrat they can locate. Unfortunately, I believe the state gov't. here would make that easy for them.

[leftofthedial]

4. they persecute political enemies

put them on no-fly lists

they have instituted egregious "security" procedures that are an insult to our civil liberties

they wiretap us illegally with no warrants

they imprison us indefinitely on trumped-up charges or on no charges at all

they use the flimsiest and concocted excuses to invade other countries illegally all for petro-lebensraum


THIS IS FASCISM!

and that is not hyperbole.

[kpete]

7. my thoughts exactly!

[FreedomAngel82]

22. That makes sense with James Moore now!

He was on the Majority Report last night talking about how he's on the special no-fly list. Someone should Email this to the Majority Report.

[obreaslan]

26. I would expect that a large bureaucracy like the IRS would be used...

To facilitate the process when the round-ups begin. If they can use a large system, already in place, to keep tabs on those deemed "dangerous" to the plan the Fundamental Extremist Republican Party has in mind for what was this great nation, it can make the "solution" more efficient.

[adigal]

5. I was audited for the first time in my life

last year and I knew it was because I had started to speak out against this administration. This is a serious violation of power.

[ClintonTyree]

34. Same here, not for just one year, but going back to 2002.........

I wondered "what the hell is going on"? Now, I know.

This little nugget really stuck in my craw; "Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of an appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the IRS, said the practice was an “outrageous violation of the public trust” that could undermine the agency’s credibility".

The Agency's credibility? Excuse me? The IRS has no credibility. They're a vicious political arm of the government used to harass, terrorize and insult American citizens!

And Agent Mike? Go ahead and report me, again. There's not one aspect of my life the IRS is not aware of after the last year of constant harassment by them so you can't do any more to me than they already have.

And after all this harassment and bullying the only thing they found were some stock transactions in 2003 THAT I LOST MONEY ON! I estimate they spent thousands of dollars checking every dollar I spent for the last three years........FOR NOTHING! :grr:

[Nothing Without Hope]

6. Hey - if they can't get you by tapping your private conversations looking

for blackmailable material, maybe they can squeeze you through the IRS. Unless you toe their line and shut up.

ETA: K & R

[JHB]

8. Any pattern here?

Most of the "blue states" are pretty solidly "blue", while most of the "red" states are softer in their "redness" and are or could be swing states? Or is that stretching it too much?

"Red":
Alaska
Arkansas
Colorado
Florida
Louisiana
Nevada
North Carolina
Ohio
Oklahoma
South Carolina
Texas
Utah

"Blue":
Connecticut
Delaware
Massachusetts
Michigan
New Jersey
New York
Rhode Island
Wisconsin

[kpete]

9. no stretching here...good point

[kath]

11. OK is not at all "soft" in its redness...

nor Utah.
But perhaps you have a point about the others.

[KittyWampus]

14. IMO, if all the votes were allowed to be cast & got counted, OK would

be either a swing state or close to one... like Texas, NM, AZ.

[JHB]

16. Thus the use of the word "most"...

...as a qualifier. I'd be very surprised if it correlated THAT neatly.

[ChoralScholar]

17. Arkansas was 51/49 as I remember... very close.

[FreedomAngel82]

23. Just like Ohio

where there was voting fraud.

[Mabus]

20. ??? Oklahoma has a Democratic governor who gave sanctuary to Texas Dems.

Brad Henry.


edited to add:

Charles Bradford "Brad" Henry (born June 10, 1963) is the Governor of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. A member of the Democratic Party, he was elected in 2002, defeating former Republican Congressman Steve Largent and Independent candidate Gary Richardson. Largent and Henry each received about 43% of the vote, while Richardson (a former Republican candidate) was the second most successful third-party gubernatorial candidate in the nation in the 2002 election, receiving 14% of the vote.

*****

Henry was officially sworn in as Oklahoma's 26th Governor on January 13, 2003, with the oath of office being administerd by his cousin, federal appeals court judge Robert Harlan Henry. He made national headlines by giving sanctuary from the redistricting warrant to Texas Democrats in that state's legislature by allowing them to travel across state lines into Oklahoma en masse to deny a quorum for voting on a redistricting plan. "Our position is that, without a warrant signed by a judge, we have no authority. Even under those circumstances, we are hesitant to get pulled into a Texas political battle. If we're going to do battle with Texas, we prefer that it be on the football field," Henry said through his spokesman. source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Henry

[shawn703]

21. Sure it's not just states that allow you to register with a party?

I lived in Michigan most of my life and know you can register with a party there, and that's on the list. I now live in Virginia where you don't register with a party, and of course it's not on the list.

Of course I only lived in 2 states, so I can't speak for the other unlisted 29 states as to whether or not you can be registered with a party.

[freebrew]

24. Party Registration

Missouri is a swing state, not on the list. There is no requirement to register a party affiliation
here either. Not even to vote in the primaries.
You may be onto something there...

[Clark2008]

35. You don't have to register with a party in Arkansas.

So, it's not exactly that, either.

[EVDebs]

10. Moderator, please merge with the 31 greatest hits on LBN site !

[RedEarth]

12. kr

[KittyWampus]

15. Are there Indian Casinos in all those states?

[ThomWV]

18. What Does It Mean?

Wait a minute.

What kind of information did they collect? Was it party donations? Was it voter registration?

It seems to me that the first possibility might indeed be a legitimate concern of the IRS, after all, are they not tax deductable?

The second case would be a much different matter I suppose. I don't see any link that would make the voter registration, as an example, information that would be legitimate for the IRS to gather.

[wishlist]

28. Donations to political candidates and parties are never tax deductible

There is absolutely no legitimate reason to collect political party affiliation by the IRS.

[Chipster]

32. Donations to political candidates and parties are never tax deductible

There was an obvious omission in the story - who was the contractor? I found that it was Accurint, an affiliate of Lexis-Nexis.

http://www.news.nteu.org/articlefiles/137-CMKletter.pdf

http://www.accurint.com/news/news_9_1_2004.html

So, I dug a bit deeper, and found that over the period 1/6-7/21/2005, the Republican National Congressional Committee spent $70,902 with Lexis-Nexis.

During the 2004 election cycle, the total expenditures by the Republican Party to Lexis-Nexis totalled $346,822.

http://www.opensecrets.org/parties/expendDetail.asp?txtName=Lexis%2DNexis&Cmte=RPC&cycle=2004&sort=amnt

The Democratic Party also uses Lexis-Nexis.

[Julius Civitatus]

36. But donations to groups like the ACLU are deductible

If you donate to the ACLU, Media Matters, or any left-leaning group, they sure can keep tabs on your political affiliation.

It has come to this, people. They are spying on us even in every corner, in our tax records, our phone conversations, etc. This is what America has become under Bush.

[salin]

37. voter registration.

They only collected the info in the states that require official affiliation. In some states (like my own) you declare at the poll during the primary only - and thus get that particular ballot - there is nothing one fills out, and there is no record of it.

It isn't legitimate, and the IRS is claiming they are scrubbing the info and the (unnamed) contractor will stop adding the data to the database. Issue is that this data base is used to determine who to audit, and who to go after for delinquent taxes. The only reason political party would be needed were if it were a criteria for those two decisions.

[Mabus]

19. Who was the vendor?

I keep thinking about Choicepoint in Florida during the 2000 election.

[salin]

38. on the LBN thread yesterday I tried to do some digging

couldn't find the name of the vendor - but I believe that Choice Point does have a contract with the IRS (though not sure for what), as does CSC (computer services corp?) for the development of an updated data mgmt system. There are certainly hundreds of other vendors - so these, at this point, mean nothing.

[Mabus]

42. Thank you

I've had a helluva weekend. It started Friday afternoon when I was getting ready to head out to meet other DU'ers to watch Mopaul's band in KC. My brother and nephew pulled up in the driveway with a car needing emergency automotive repair. Getting a mechanic to work on the weekend was a challenge. He ended up calling friends and other relatives and the next thing I knew I had a houseful of people when I wasn't expecting any visitors at all. They are starting to filter out now. After they've all gone I'll start looking and see if I can find anything.

I think the contractor is important because it will help give the "motivation" of why they were culling information in the first place. I'll let you know if I find anything.

[Mabus]

43. Here's something interesting - company indicted WITH DeLay

Bill allows IRS to contract out collection of debts
Washington Post
Sunday, December 5, 2004

Washington -- When Reps. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., teamed up in September to get the House to pass an amendment blocking the use of private companies to collect back taxes from delinquent taxpayers, it seemed the Bush administration plan might be doomed for at least a year.

But in the final hours of drafting a 3,300-page spending bill last month, House and Senate negotiators eliminated Capito's and Van Hollen's handiwork, clearing the way for the Internal Revenue Service to hire commercial debt collectors. These private agents could keep as much as 25 percent of the amounts they recovered.

While the Bush administration has strongly supported the initiative as a way to increase revenue collections amid growing deficits, critics contend it could lead to harassment of taxpayers and breaches of privacy. Labor groups representing federal workers also oppose the change. But it has the backing of the debt-collection industry, which has contributed heavily to GOP organizations and causes since Bush became president.

One company that lobbied for the change is Union City-based Diversified Collection Services Inc., one of eight companies indicted in September by a Texas grand jury, along with three Republican fund-raisers for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, on charges of alleged money laundering and illegal corporate campaign contributions.

for the rest of the article: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/12/05/MNGDIA6NB81.DTL


Interesting. I'll keep checking.

[cosmicdot]

44. ChoicePoint has been awarded an IRS contract

just surfing the possibilities
````````````````````````````````

06/28/05

IRS search for public records access ends with ChoicePoint

By Doug Beizer
Contributing Staff Writer

The Internal Revenue Service has awarded ChoicePoint Government Services a contract worth as much as $20 million to serve as the agency's public records provider for batch processing projects, according to the company.

Under a five-year contract, ChoicePoint will provide the IRS with access to its suite of custom data solutions. IRS officials will use ChoicePoint’s public records data capabilities to support customized data retrieval requirements.

ChoicePoint provides public records information about a person, asset or location, a company spokesperson said. The information can include current and former addresses, property ownership records and bankruptcy, lien or judgment information.

~snip~

Batch processing involves the automated delivery and processing of data files, which reduces the need for human intervention. More than 25 federal agencies use ChoicePoint batch solutions to support their daily activities, company officials said.

~snip~

http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/36239-1.html

IRS Hires ChoicePoint To Leak Your Info

Contributed by Mike on Thursday, June 30th, 2005 @ 01:08AM

ChoicePoint is the personal data company that kicked off this sudden focus on data leaks by cheerfully handing over thousands of records to a bunch of crooks who had no business with the data. So, now that our government is planning to put in place stricter laws punishing such activity, how do they reward ChoicePoint? Politech notes that the IRS has handed over a huge contract to ChoicePoint. That'll show them. Of course, perhaps even more worrisome is the fact that the IRS will now be using this info to checkup on tax payers, when reviews of ChoicePoint's data has shown repeatedly that its data is often wrong -- with many people seeing criminal records when they've never been in trouble. Also, it's worth pointing out that ChoicePoint is a spinoff from Equifax, the company whose CEO tap danced around whether or not they've leaked any data and claimed that letting you see what data they had on you was unconstitutional and un-American. Doesn't that make you feel safer? http://techdirt.com/articles/20050630/017242_F.shtml


I don't know why an off-shore company like Accenture (formerly part of enron's auditor Arthur Andersen) gets so many federal contracts. Of course, Accenture took over FL's voter database after ChoicePoint, personally handpicked by Katherine Harris. Accenture has been awarded IRS contracts.

Wouldn't trust Accenture any further than you could throw ChoicePoint.

Quest, another one of our curious corporations, hosts the IRS website. http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/864391

What is TIPSS?

TIPSS-3 large business awardees are:

Accenture LLP of Chicago (yeah, right ... try Bermuda)
Apogen Technologies Inc. of McLean, Va.
BearingPoint Inc. of McLean, Va.
Booz Allen Hamilton
CGI-AMS Inc. of Montreal
Computer Sciences Corp.
EDS Corp.
FC Business Systems Inc. of Fairfax, Va.
IBM Corp.
Lockheed Martin Corp.
Management Systems Designers Inc. of Fairfax, Va.
Northrop Grumman Corp.
QSS Group Inc. of Lanham, Md.
Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego
Unisys Corp.

TIPSS-3 small business awardees are:

ActioNet Inc. of Fairfax, Va.
Avineon Inc. of Alexandria, Va.
Catapult Technology Ltd. of Bethesda, Md.
InSysCo Inc. of Fredericksburg, Va.
Inter Image Inc. of Arlington, Va.
Pragmatics Inc. of McLean, Va.

http://www.washingtontechnology.com/news/1_1/WT_Top100/27382-1.html

Dynamics Awarded $2.5 Million IRS Contract

Dynamics Research Corporation announced that it has been awarded a nine month, $2.5 million contract by the Internal Revenue Service to modernize the agency's information technology systems and legacy databases.

The IRS faces a daunting challenge that extends across all Federal government agencies to modernize its information technology systems quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively. For this contract, DRC will partner with Oracle Corporation to execute and support the conversion of the IRS' legacy DB2 databases to Oracle databases, a transition process that will significantly aid and support the agency's modernization efforts.

The indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract initiated February 23, 2004 falls under the Treasury Information Processing Support Services (TIPSS) contract vehicle. As the IRS continues to place more of its information technology modernization efforts within this vehicle, DRC, as a prime contractor under TIPSS, is well positioned to partner with the IRS on additional modernization efforts going forward.

~snip~

http://www.taborcommunications.com/hpcwire/hpcwireWWW/04/0305/107178.html

http://www.drc.com/ (Dynamics Research Corp.)

[Mabus]

46. Wow, great information

scary but great. I'm still reading through it and doing a little more research. If I find anything I will pass it on.

[Julius Civitatus]

25. It's official: we are no longer a Democracy. It's all gone, baby.

Bush flushed our Constitution down the toilet.

Someone please tell me:
WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF THE IRS FOR KEEPING TABS AND TRACKING THE POLITICAL AFFILIATION OF CITIZENS?

Come on, people!!!

They are spying on Americans, keeping tabs on them, tracking them down, creating lists, etc. They have turned us into an Orwellian society, big time.

[Doctor_J]

31. Nah, hate radio and Cabal News will soon be shouting,

well, if they're not ashamed of being Democrats, why do they care?

[txaslftist]

27. Well duh...

How else are they supposed to know where to redraw the district lines?

[roguevalley]

29. Nixon messed with people's taxes. Great. My taxes are part of Alaska.

[Doctor_J]

30. I am Dem who's been audited 4 straight years

but I live in IL. Hmmmm.

[LeahD]

33. Be afraid, very afraid.

And remember that under no condition should you ever speak out! Nothing to see here. Just be good little sheeple and go about your daily business.


Kicked and nominated!

[TankLV]

39. Well, now we KNOW they were targeting Dems & anybody else opposed

to the little dictator!

Why aren't the dems howling about this spying of POLITICAL "enemies" by bush*?!!!

And we "wonder" how the dems "lost" all those seemingly won or close races!

[tlsmith1963]

40. Sigh of Relief

They didn't target California. Whew!

Tammy

[mwooldri]

41. Well it's easy to track affiliation with NC state taxes:

The D400 (which is the state equiv of the IRS 1040) has a question regarding the funding of the NC Political Parties Financing Fund. You have a choice of Democratic, Republican or Unspecified.

Maybe the IRS should change the Presidential Political Campaign Finance Fund? Maybe they're trying to do it as to figure out how to disperse that fund? Or am I just being naieve again?

Many thanks for your input in advance.

[Nothing Without Hope]

45. ***RELATED and crucial: IRS has been illegally preventing audit overview:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2029357
thread title (1-8-06 LBN): IRS Said to Improperly Restrict Access (Bush

EXCERPT:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration has illegally stopped making public detailed tax enforcement data, which has been used to show which kinds of taxpayers get the most and toughest audits, a noted tax researcher says.??Syracuse University Professor Susan B. Long said in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle late last week that since Nov. 1, 2004, the Internal Revenue Service has violated a 1976 court order requiring the release of the data.