Did IRS Overstep In $5 Million Campaign To Pressure Americans On Obamacare?

Source: ZeroHedge

"The IRS would never push legal boundaries in order to pursue the ideological agenda of a political party in Washington D.C., right?  Well, aside from that time that Lois Lerner used her position inside the IRS to target Tea Party Organizations in order to help Obama get re-elected in 2012, of course.

While we all may wish that were the case, new documents obtained by  Judicial Watch  (JW) today via a FOIA request seem to indicate that the IRS may have overstepped it's bounds when it sent out letters to taxpayers threatening them with monetary penalties if they failed to sign up for Obamacare.  As JW notes,  the IRS spent a staggering $5 million to develop a program specifically designed to intimidate voters into signing up for the controversial healthcare legislation.

Judicial Watch today announced it received two production of documents, 77 pages and 108 pages, from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revealing the Obama IRS coordinated with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Obama White House Behavioral Sciences  “Team” in a $5 million program to pressure Americans to sign up for Obamacare.  The documents also contain inter-agency agreements between the IRS and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) devised to circumvent potential legal prohibitions on unauthorized disclosure or inspection of taxpayer information collected by the IRS.

 In September 2016, IRS Director of Individual Taxation Janet McCubbin writes to several of her colleagues:

 Attached are drafts of the letters that IRS will send to selected taxpayers who paid a penalty for failure to have coverage  or who claimed an exemption form the coverage requirement for tax year 2015 …  As you know, we are planning to send several different versions of the letter to see which types of messages work best.

Of course, by suggesting that several letters were drafted to see which "messages work best," McCubbin seems to give away her hand that her goal was not simply to inform taxpayers, but rather to coerce them into pursuing her desired outcome.

But that's not the only foul here as JW also asserts that the IRS  "may have overstepped its authority by  threatening people  with penalty fees." ..."

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-03/did-irs-overstep-5-million-campaign-pressure-americans-obamacare