Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations the Right to Appeal Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of what is commonsense legislation, H.R. 1314. What it does is gives tax-exempt status applicants whose application is denied the right to appeal that decision. That seems fundamental, doesn't it, in a country likes ours,
where the Constitution built within it the concept of the right to petition your government for the decisions that they make.

The purpose of the legislation is simple. What it will do is codify in statute the requirement for the IRS to create a mechanism by which 501(c) organizations--tax-exempt organizations--if they get an adverse determination of their tax-exempt status, they can request an administrative appeal to the agency's internal Office of Appeals.

My colleague from Illinois talked about the concept here of impunity. To me, this is a lot of what this speaks to. The idea that an administrative agency--in this case, the IRS--will take this application and then would make a decision--it was because of the good work that was done in the previous Congress by this committee and the Oversight Subcommittee of this committee, that they exposed the reality that, in many cases, these particular appeals, these particular decisions, were being made after the applicant was being targeted because of the fact that they had chosen to express particular political views in the context of their application.

What was done was that those applications, once denied, were diverted to a different part of the structure in which they went to die. That made the IRS the judge; the jury; and, in fact, the executioner because you were done with respect to your application. There was no place else to go.

Now, I have to say that, when this came to light because of the work of this committee, the IRS did issue interim guidance in May 2014 that ensured that all groups subject to a denial would have the right to appeal the decision.

This bill today, H.R. 1314, codifies that guidance into law so there is no ambiguity and that, once again, we don't have the ability of the IRS to indiscriminately and sua sponte make their own decisions about when American taxpayers should have the right to be able to petition for an appeal of an adverse decision.

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I urge my colleagues, as they have on our subcommittee and our committee with their unanimous support from both sides of the aisle, to support this commonsense taxpayer protection and to send an unmistakable signal to the American taxpayers that they should not be targeted by the IRS for their political views.

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Mr. Speaker, I think the point has been made very articulately by all of the speakers who have talked about what really is a fundamental and simple issue, which is the right to appeal to your government.

What concerned me the most when we began to look at what occurred with the IRS conduct in the context of the applications by the organizations which were denied based on their perceived political views or religious views, that the process for these particular applicants was changed; that it went to a different division, where, as
my colleague from Illinois identified, it went to die in the cul-de-sac.

So this is a question of fundamental fairness, that every American taxpayer should have the right to be treated equally. That is all we are asking for here, fundamental, equal treatment, and the right, when you disagree with the decision by an IRS administrative official, to have somebody else question that decision.

That is fundamental. It is simple. It is basic American, and I am very proud that we have colleagues from both sides of the aisle who have joined together to petition to assure that that right is codified into law. That is what we accomplish today.

I am grateful for the support of all of my colleagues and the leadership of the chairman of the subcommittee, who has been helping to bring to light these abuses. I urge my colleagues to support the legislation.

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