The IRS flagged one hundred percent of the groups with "Tea Party," "Patriots" and "9/12" in their names Treasury Inspector General Robert George wrote in a letter this week to Michigan Rep Sandy Levin, a Democrat, The Hill reports. Despite claims to the contrary, progressive groups were not targeted, he said.
“Our audit did not find evidence that the IRS used the ‘progressives’ identifier as selection criteria for potential political cases between May 2010 and May 2012,” George wrote in the letter obtained by The Hill.
The inspector general also stressed that 100 percent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “patriots” and “9/12” in their name were flagged for extra attention.
“While we have multiple sources of information corroborating the use of Tea Party and other related criteria we described in our report, including employee interviews, e-mails and other documents, we found no indication in any of these other materials that ‘progressives’ was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention,” George wrote to Levin, the top Democrat on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.