Introduction
In the fiscal year 2012, the United States Internal Revenue Service collected $2.5 trillion. That's more money than any of us could even begin to fathom. With this comes a great responsibility to the agency to conduct itself in an equal manner among all of its patrons. Lately, the IRS has been under intense heat that has sparked from its quesitonable treatment of several groups seeking to operate within a tax-exempt status. In order to better understand what's going on what it means to us we will explore the history of the IRS, then discover what the applicable tax code means, and finally, and finally dive into the imposing scandal surrounding the agency.
Who is the IRS?
Let's first take a look at what the IRS actually is.
According to IRS.gov, in 1862 President Lincoln joined with Congress to create a new position, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue. This position was created with the intention to enforce the recently enacted income in order to fund the Civil War. A few years later,the tax was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court only to be revived by the 16th Amendment in 1913 under the new title of Bureau of Internal Revenue.
Today, the federal organization has been modernized by the "IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998." This act gives the IRS a directive to aide in the responsibilities of the Secretary of the Treasury, who has full authority to administer and enforce the internal revenue laws.
The current US tax code is more than 73,000 pages-- if the pages were laid end to end, they would stretch just over 12.5 miles long. This code is extremely complex and more than mysterious to the common man. Even professionsals whos' entire lives have been dedicated to learning the ins-and-outs and loopholes within this monster only master specific sections.
It is the job of the IRS to dot every I and cross every T of the code. In order to do this, they maintain four primary divisions over many subdivisions and