The document isn't clear on whether the IRS misled Congress. 5 takeaways from IRS report 
 
 The most hotly anticipated IRS probe since Watergate didn’t exactly live up to the hype. 
 
 The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report leaked on Tuesday evening doesn’t nail anyone for lying to Congress. It didn’t out rogue liberal IRS agents with an ax to grind against nonprofit tea party groups. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 But the watchdog report did break new ground, clearly declaring that the IRS crossed the line in asking about donors to conservative groups. It reveals the IRS to be a stubborn agency that isn’t ready to fix all the problems in the report. And it warns that a crackdown on these 501(c)(4) groups isn’t coming any time soon. 
 
 ( PHOTOS: 10 slams on the IRS) 
 
 Here’s the top five things takeaways from the Inspector General report: 
 
 IRS agents weren't partisan 
 
 Republicans looking for a smoking gun on partisan motive will have to keep looking — the report stops short of calling the IRS intentionally partisan, even if the questions might have been inappropriate. 
 
 Most of the report focuses on reprimanding the IRS for choosing ineffective criteria that could be construed as partisan rather than focusing on a partisan motive. Only about 15 percent of the potential cases had the terms “Tea Party,” “patriots” and “9/12” in their organization name. The remaining cases were flagged for other reasons. 
 
 The report found that the narrow focus of the criteria “gives the appearance that the IRS is not impartial in conducting its mission.” 
 
 “Using the names or policy positions of organizations is not an appropriate basis for identifying applications for review by the team of specialists,” the inspector general said. 
 
 ( Also on POLITICO: Watchdog: IRS used 'inappropriate criteria') 
 
 The report never directly accuses the IRS of bias, just the appearance of impropriety. 
 
 Despite the inappropriate search criteria, the majority of applications flagged by the Cincinnati office had indications of significant violations of tax policy. The report found that about 69 percent of the fully documented cases on the list were properly identified. 
 
 Unclear on whether the IRS misled Congress 
 
 The report remains silent on what is emerging as the biggest Republican grievance — how Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller and former Commissioner Doug Shulman failed to disclose to Congress what they learned about the targeting program after May 2012. 
 
 Miller wrote letters to the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Republicans months after he was briefed but never disclosed that the agency was giving an extra critical eye to conservative groups. Government oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) also accused division head Lois Lerner of misleading Congress after her June 2011 discovery. 
 
 “It appears that you provided false or misleading information on four separate occasions last year in response to the committee’s oversight of the IRS’s treatment of conservative groups applying for tax exempt status,” Issa and committee member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) wrote. 
 
 But you won’t read about that in the IG report. 
 
 The controversial answers from Miller on why top agency employees did not tell Congress about the extra scrutiny will likely come forth during the Ways and Means hearing this Friday. 
 
 Asking about donors crossed the line 
 
 If tea party groups thought the questions were intrusive, even the Inspector General agrees that asking about donors and books read was a bridge too far. 
 
 The Inspector General said donor lists and details were an unnecessary, burdensome request in the vetting process. That may be the biggest victory for frustrated conservatives. 
 
 The report also makes clear that the IRS knew that it overstepped its bounds when it asked for donor records. 
 
 “Officials informed us that they decided to destroy all donor lists that were sent in for potential political cases that the IRS determined it should not have requested,” the report said. ||||| Ineffective management at the Internal Revenue Service led to certain groups being singled out for more than 18 months based on their names or mission statements, according to a Treasury Inspector General report obtained by ABC News. 
 
 IRS officials told IG investigators that their actions were not influenced by any outside officials or agencies. The use of inappropriate criteria to screen applicants resulted in significant delays for groups applying for tax exempt status, and also allowed unnecessary requests for information, the report found. 
 
 Among the criteria that IRS employees used to flag groups for extra scrutiny was having words like "tea party" or "patriots" in their names, focusing on issues like government spending, debt or taxes, and statements that criticized how the country is being run. 
 
 "Criteria for selecting applications for the team of specialists should focus on the activities of the organizations and whether they fulfill the requirements of the law," the IG report found. "Using the names or policy positions of organizations is not an appropriate basis for identifying applications for review by the team of specialists." 
 
 Read highlights of the IG report HERE. 
 
 As a result, most applications were not processed for more than 13 months, with some groups waiting more than three years for approval. 
 
 The IRS said in a statement this evening that it "welcomes" the report and "agrees that aspects of the original approach for handling the influx of tax-exempt applications were inappropriate, but it is important to clarify a few points." 
 
 "Inappropriate shortcuts" were used to identify groups that might be engaged in political activity, the IRS statement admitted, but said most of the groups would likely have been examined the same way regardless of whether those "shortcuts" were used to identify them. 
 
 "It is also important to understand that the group of centralized cases included organizations of all political views," the IRS statement said. 
 
 "There was no intent to hide this issue, but rather we waited until TIGTA completed their fact finding, made recommendations, and we reviewed their findings," the statement said. 
 
 Joseph Grant, the acting commissioner of tax exempt and government entities, wrote in response to the report that the decisions were made in an attempt to increase efficiency, not to target groups with a particular political view. 
 
 "The mistakes outlined in the report resulted from the lack of a set process for working the increase in advocacy cases and insufficient sensitivity to the implications of some of the decisions made," he wrote. 
 
 "We believe the front line career employees that made the decisions acted out of a desire for efficiency and not out of any political or partisan view point," he wrote. 
 
 According to the report, the practice emerged because of insufficient oversight and a lack of knowledge by IRS employees of the rules that governed tax exempt organizations. 
 
 "[T]he criteria developed showed a lack of knowledge in the Determinations Unit of what activities are allowed by I.R.C. § 501(c)(3) and I.R.C. § 501(c)(4) organizations," the report found, using the tax code designations for tax-exempt organizations. "Determinations Unit employees stated that they considered the Tea Party criterion as a shorthand term for all potential political cases." 
 
 The report comes in response to requests from several members of Congress to look into whether the IRS had treated conservative or tea party groups unfairly based on their political affiliation. 
 
 By using criteria like "political sounding names" to select groups for additional scrutiny, the report says that the IRS actually failed to look closely at groups that should have been carefully scrutinized because of the volume of political activity they were engaged in. 
 
 Other groups that weren't engaged in much political activity were caught in the IRS's dragnet and their applications were severely delayed, the report found. 
 
 In 58 percent of cases, groups were asked to provide "irrelevant" information in response to inquiries from the IRS. 
 
 According to the report, Lois Lerner, the Director of Exempt Organizations, found out about the inappropriate criteria for screening groups in June 2011. 
 
 Lerner immediately changed the IRS's policy to make it more broad, but the team of specialists assigned to the cases changed the criteria again without approval from their superiors, the report found. 
 
 The report comes as Attorney General Eric Holder announced today that he has ordered an FBI investigation of the IRS's dealings with conservative groups seeking tax exempt status. 
 
 The order is likely to mean that IRS officials could be subject to FBI interrogation and, possibly, subpoenas. 
 
 Lawmakers in the House Ways and Means Committee today requested that the IRS provide Congress with documents related to the targeting of conservative groups by May 21. 
 
 The committee will hold a hearing on the subject on Friday. 
 
 Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., among other lawmakers, said he is committed to getting to the bottom of what he called the agency's "blatant and thuggish abuse of power." ||||| The Internal Revenue Service apologized Friday to conservative political groups for giving their tax documents extra scrutiny — validating the worst fears of Republican activists who have long accused the Obama administration of politicizing the process. 
 
 Roughly 75 groups were singled out using words like “tea party” or “patriot” in tax documents, Lois Lerner, who is responsible for overseeing tax-exempt groups, said on a hastily arranged conference call Friday afternoon. 
 
 Text Size - 
 
 + 
 
 reset Lerner answers questions at ABA Section of Taxation Conference PODCAST: Week in review 
 
 The White House said Friday that the IRS inspector general is investigating the matter. 
 
 “What we know about this is of concern,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said, emphasizing that the IRS is an independent agency with only two political appointees. The agency is technically a division of the Treasury Department. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Where does IRS look for cheats?) 
 
 “It certainly does seem to be based on what we’ve seen to be inappropriate action that we would want to see thoroughly investigated,” Carney said. 
 
 Decisions to review the conservative groups were made by career employees in Cincinnati, Lerner said, but she declined to say if anyone has been disciplined. Lerner added that the IRS never denied tax exempt status to any conservative organization — it only asked for additional information. 
 
 “Mistakes were made initially, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale,” the IRS said in a separate statement. 
 
 The announcement is the latest black eye for an agency that has been criticized by members of Congress from both parties, reform groups and conservative activists for its handling of politically active tax-exempt nonprofits. 
 
 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called for President Barack Obama to order a “transparent, government-wide review” to see if similar practices are happening elsewhere in the administration. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Immigration's new ally: Tea partiers) 
 
 House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany told POLITICO he will launch an “aggressive” investigation. “We’re not going to let this rest,” the Louisiana Republican said. 
 
 “The IRS cannot target or intimidate any individual or organization based on their political beliefs. The House will investigate this matter,” said Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). 
 
 Outside groups on both sides have increasingly chosen to organize as nonprofits — regulated and reviewed by the IRS instead of the Federal Election Commission. Their nonprofit status exempts those groups from paying federal taxes — and unlike super PACs, allows them to hide their donors. 
 
 Major outside groups like the Karl Rove-affiliated Crossroads GPS, Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity and the pro-Barack Obama group Priorities USA are organized as 501(c)(4) nonprofits. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: The Tea Party Caucus returns) 
 
 The IRS statement said the agency “should have done a better job” dealing with the dramatic influx in applications for 501(c)(4) status. 
 
 “When we see an uptick in applications from a particular type of group…that we don’t ordinarily see, what we do is we centralize those applications into one group to work on them. We do this all the time,” Lerner told reporters. “The problem here was that in some cases they added actual case names to the list. They added ‘tea party’ and ‘patriot’ to the list of cases that should be centralized in this group.”
– The inspector general's IRS report is out (read it in full at the Washington Post, if 54 pages of dry analysis and liberal use of the underline function sound like your thing), and some pundits say it's not exactly as jaw-droppingly scandalous as it was made out to be. The delays for organizations seeking tax-exempt status caused by the IRS heaping extra scrutiny on them is certainly unacceptable, writes Ezra Klein at the Washington Post, but there's "no allegation here of politicization," he writes. Just confusion and incompetence. "The most hotly anticipated IRS probe since Watergate didn't exactly live up to the hype," write Kelsey Snell and Lauren French at Politico, offering some takeaways from the report: First, they agree IRS agents weren't motivated by partisanship, but asking organizations for donor records was burdensome and unnecessary. And the IRS has more work to do to fix the problems: The report makes nine recommendations, but the agency has agreed to only seven. One it hasn't agreed to is drafting new guidelines for how it should investigate politically-oriented groups. But given how touchy the subject is right now, it may not be able to for some time, say Snell and French—and that means it may now be impossible to actually police which groups really are crossing the line.