With the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” poised to pass the House of Representatives on Friday, Conservative and Christian organizations are sounding an alarm, warning that the Bill will be used to further “weaponize the IRS.”
The Bill, H.R. 5376, which passed in the Senate down party lines in a 50-51 vote, among other things, will add 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents to the federal agencies’ payroll “in an effort to raise $124 billion in new revenue through enhanced ‘enforcement’ actions, such as audits,” according to the Washington Stand.
“The act would heavily inflate the number of IRS audits performed — and critics warn the majority will fall on people of faith, and limited means, who oppose the president’s policies,” Washington Stand Editor, Ben Johnson, reported.
Family Research Council senior director of Government Affairs, Quena González, in an interview on Thursday, expressed his concern, underscoring that “Conservatives and conservative organizations like [FRC] know that the IRS has been weaponized in the past to come after us ideologically.”
“The IRS initially denied a Christian organization their tax-exempt status, because they mentioned biblical teachings on their application,” González described. “There’s a prior history of the IRS of targeting tax-exempt groups for additional scrutiny based on their perceived political affiliation.”
“Just last week, 40 House Democrats … sent a letter to the IRS commissioner asking them to look into Family Research Council’s nonprofit status, because they don’t like our politics,” he stressed. “These kinds of misinformation-fueled investigations of conservative groups and of conservative individuals causes a lot of concern.”
This scrutiny of the IRS does not come out of the blue. As Stand Up For The Truth host David Fiorazo explained in February, the plethora of information documenting the targeting of Christians and Conservatives over the years makes it difficult for the federal agency to cover up their bias.
“The scandal-ridden, partisan IRS couldn’t keep covering up its loyalty to the left, and truth was leaked out little by little,” he explained, noting that the IRS “especially hated the Tea Party movement.”
“Who can forget how the Obama/Biden Justice Department used the IRS as a bully pulpit to punish their political opposition and deny non-profit status to many Christian and conservative groups prior to the 2021 presidential election?” Fiorazo, who authored the book Canceling Christianity, asked.
“I reported back in 2015 about the alleged computer crashes at the IRS causing employees to lose internal emails. The problem is those employees were under federal investigation in a case involving the targeting of conservatives,” he described. “More than twenty IRS employees conveniently had their computers crash which caused the suspicious deletion of, or the loss of emails as well as hard drives. (Apparently, only conservatives and Republicans in government agencies are required by law to back-up their data on external hard drives.)”
“Who can forget – and most Americans have – former IRS Exempt Organizations Division Director, Lois Lerner,” Fiorazo continued. “IRS officials, including Lerner, worked with Democrats to silence conservatives and used IRS intimidation tactics to do so. Documents showed Lerner wanted to bring charges against someone and make an example out of them.”
“Under her watch (April 2010 to April 2012), the IRS placed holds on the processing of hundreds of applications for tax-exempt status from organizations known to be conservative!” he reminded readers. “By limiting the ability of conservative or Republican groups to acquire non-profit status to freely campaign and mobilize for a cause or candidate, the IRS indirectly affected election outcomes across the United States. Out of all existing nonprofit groups flagged in 2014 for IRS Surveillance, 83% were conservative. The government monitored group’s activities, their websites, and other publicly available information.”
“Even citizens who donated to tea party-affiliated groups were audited ten times more than average Americans,” he further detailed. “But one of the most glaring facts revealing Democrat corruption was this: of all the groups the IRS selected for audit during those Obama/Biden years, 100% of them were conservative.”
Many ministries and churches, that currently have non-profit status, openly acknowledge that their 501c3 standing is placed in jeopardy by the IRS’ hostility to their Biblical convictions.
Jack Hibbs, the Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, regarding this IRS belligerence, told Politico in 2014, “I know my days are numbered. As long as I’m Biblical, I’m cool with that.”
Expanding on this, Hibbs at the time, in an interview with Fox News stressed that Pastors and Ministries “should be able to say, frankly, whatever God puts on our heart to say.”
“If we look at the track record of the IRS it has not been stellar, it has certainly not been fair, and this is something where the American people need to stand up,” he said. “Churches should be able to speak into the culture. At what point do they say, for example, the fact that Jesus Christ came, died on the cross for our sins, and rose again from the grave, now that is a political statement?”
