Cincinnati IRS Worker Tells Wash. Post-----Our Orders Came from Above

Was it a few rogue employees or is it just another excuse from out Blame-Guy-In-Chief? That's what the Obama administration is saying about the IRS scandal which targeted conservative and religious organizations.  At least that's what they are telling us between contending they know nothing or that everything is irrelevant. 


According to the people in the Cincinnati office of the Internal Revenue Service, any targeting of Conservatives was a result of of orders from "above."

“We’re not political,’’ said one determinations staffer in khakis as he left work late Tuesday afternoon. “We people on the local level are doing what we are supposed to do. . . . That’s why there are so many people here who are flustered. Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”

The staff member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, said that the determinations unit is competent and without bias, that it grouped together conservative applications “for consistency’s sake” — so one application did not sail through while a similar one was held up in review. This consistency is paramount in the review of all applications, according to Ronald Ran, an estate-tax lawyer who worked for 37 years in the IRS’s Cincinnati office.

“You’re not going to have a bunch of flaming liberals in the exempt-organizations department looking for conservative applications,” he said.

So what do you have on this fourth floor in Cincinnati?

An open, L-shaped layout of small, plain cubicles. (Office norms discourage the decoration of cubicle walls.)

“In movies where they put an IRS agent in a private office, and they’ve got all this stuff — I’m like, ‘In whose dream?’ ”

It's ridiculous to believe that career bureaucrats,  who's advancement is based on following procedures, would go rogue and target specific groups without direction from top IRS management.  The fact that it was all done during the President's reelection campaign makes it difficult to accept that there was not a high up in the administration or in the Presidents campaign giving the orders to the IRS.  Hopefully the congressional investigation will dig up the truth.