Friday, January 06, 2006

IRS Tracking Party Affiliation



Hesiod on Atrios threads linked to an article about the Internal Revenue Service tracking the party affiliation of tax payers:

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.

"The bottom line is that we have never used this information," said John Lipold, an IRS spokesman. "There are strict laws in place that forbid it."

My bolds in the quote. Now how can you write irony when real-world commentary does it better? Not fair.

Now we need a good, independent study on the correlations between belonging to the Democratic party and getting audited. And by a good study I mean one which controls for all the other reasons to get audited.