It's systemic, I believe. I have no verifiable information to support that other than the revelations that seem to be coming out on a daily basis now. So far, we have a guy taking early retirement, and a couple of apologies from two low level people in Cincinnati who we are supposed to believe ran the whole operation.
http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2013reports/201310053fr.pdf
what the IG has presented is nothing more than piss poor management - and laws/regulations that are other than clear and specific
to be recognized as tax exempt under internal revenue code 501 (c) (4) an applicant organization MUST be PRIMARILY engaged in the promotion of social welfare. social welfare does NOT include 'political campaign intervention'.
now, as the assigned specialist determining whether the applicant was primarily engaged in social work in contrast to political campaign intervention, what is the benchmark which allows you to distinguish between the two?
for those applications which gave no indication of political campaign intervention as part of their organization's activities, they were processed and approved on the merits of the application data received. they were the easy ones.the IG says a couple should have been more thoroughly evaluated, but otherwise they were routine actions
but those applications from organizations whose information provided an indication they were involved in political campaign intervention, now the test was to determine how much political campaign intervention was too much to allow them to be found tax exempt, when compared to how much social welfare promotion they engaged in
and this was the crux of the problem. those non-routine applications were sorted out and not acted upon because the specialists were awaiting direction from various other departments of the IRS, especially including the technical unit, rulings and agreements section, operations unit, quality assurance unit, and general counsel's office
it was a management cluster****, which will be obvious to those who read the timeline
the unit managers were frequently changed. no one seemed to be able to give definition to the need for benchmarking the acceptable level of political campaign intervention and especially how to measure it. so the managers did nothing. and the specialists, who could not process the application consistent with the regulations until the standard operating procedures were put in place, did not process the non-routine applications while awaiting the benchmarking to be established
now, during this span, the staff began looking for ways to distinguish the routine submissions from the non-routine applications. here is where they identified applicant organization names as being indicative of non-routine submissions where there was expected to be a degree of political campaign intervention. which is why organizations self identified as tea party, patriots, progressive, and the like were flagged for a higher level of scrutiny. which added scrutiny could only occur once the benchmarking was established
again. lots of management incompetence. nothing found in the way of partisan bias
read the report and see for yourself