[Feds]

IRS Gathers its Own Data

The Tacoma News Tribune reports today that the IRS was gathering data on tax filers' political affiliation:

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

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.

If your first reaction is a yawn (as mine was), there is this little nugget that may explain things:

In a letter to Kelly, Deputy IRS Commissioner John Dalrymple said the party identification information was automatically collected through a “database platform” supplied by an outside contractor that targeted voter registration rolls among other things as it searched for people who aren’t paying their taxes....

[The Treasury Department Union spokesperson] said the collection of such data was even more troubling because the IRS intends to start using private collection agencies later this year to go after back taxes.

Which is to say, if you were an unscrupulous administration looking to disproportionately audit Democrats, you could. That we even consider such a hypothesis reasonable shows how intrusive our president has become.