text: 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. ||||| This just out: The Treasury Department's Inspector General report argues that the IRS developed “inappropriate criteria” in focusing on conservative groups. Here are the key findings: 
   
   The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of potential political campaign intervention. Ineffective management: 1) allowed inappropriate criteria to be developed and stay in place for more than 18 months, 2) resulted in substantial delays in processing certain applications, and 3) allowed unnecessary information requests to be issued. 
   
   And here's the full report: 
   
   http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2013/05/201310053fr-revised-redacted-1.pdf 
   
   My colleagues Juliet Eilperin and Zachary Goldfarb have a write-up of the report as well. ||||| "Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review." 
   
   That's the title of the Inspector General's report on the IRS's treatment of tea-party related groups. It's not a very good title. A better one might be "How a group of I.R.S. employees created a politically biased test for 501(c)(4) applicants, got smacked down, quietly created another politically biased test, and then got smacked down even harder -- but in the process, created a lot of delays and trouble for the groups caught in their net." 
   
   Okay, so that's not such a good title, either. 
   
   
   
   The key story of the report seems to be this: In the summer of 2010, in response to a huge surge in 501(c)(4) applications and media stories that some of these groups were illegally acting like political organizations, a group of IRS officials developed inappropriate criteria for identifying overly politicized 501(c)(4)s applicants. Those criteria included looking for the words "tea party" or related terms. In July 2011, the director of the IRS told them to knock it off and use more politically neutral criteria that focused on the activities of the group rather than the name or ideology of the group. 
   
   Here's where things get interesting: In January 2012, that same group of IRS officials goes rogue and changes the test back without getting management approval. According to the IG report, "they believed the July 2011 criteria were too broad." They're found out three months later and, in May 2012, a new IRS director again demands the test is revised to "more clearly focus on activities permitted under the Treasury Regulations." That's the test the IRS is using now, and the IG seems comfortable with it. 
   
   Management, however, isn't happy with what's been going on. They issue "a memorandum requiring all original entries and changes to criteria...be approved at the executive level prior to implementation." 
   
   So that's the core of the story. But it's not the whole story. Much of the report is about confusion, incompetence, and unacceptable delays in the IRS unit that manages questionable 501(c)(4) applications. There's no allegation here of politicization. But it's nevertheless unacceptable: 
   
   Many organizations waited much longer than 13 months for a decision, while others have yet to receive a decision from the IRS. For example, as of December 17, 2012, the IRS had been processing several potential political cases for more than 1,000 calendar days. Some of these organizations received requests for additional information in Calendar Year 2010 and then did not hear from the IRS again for more than a year while the Determinations Unit waited for assistance from the Technical Unit. For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, 33 as of December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles). 
   
   Those aren't reasonable delays. Then there's this charming tidbit: Some of the "letters requested that the information be provided in two or three weeks (as is customary in these letters) despite the fact that the IRS had done nothing with some of the applications for more than one year." Imagine you're the director of a hopeful 501(c)(4) that applied to the IRS a year ago, got no response, and then all of a sudden you receive a letter demanding tons of information within two or three weeks. It's absurd. 
   
   These delays impose a real cost, too. It's been noted that none of the groups caught in this net were rejected for 501(c)(4) status. That's true. But many of them are still waiting for a ruling, and others saw their activities held up for over two years. 
   
   Some of the information the IRA requested was also inappropriate, and could've revealed donor information that the 501(c)(4) designation is designed to keep secret. Again, quoting the IG report: "The Determinations Unit requested donor information from 27 organizations that it would be required to make public if the application was approved, even though this information could not be disclosed by the IRS when provided by organizations whose tax-exempt status had been approved." 
   
   The key question related to the political test remains: Why hasn't anyone been fired? It's not definitive whether there's any evidence that the IRS employees who created the tea-party-focused test and then recreated it after the director objected did so for political reasons. It certainly seems possible. And even if their actions were entirely non-political there was a lot of incompetence and a bit of insubordination. What were the consequences? 
   
   The key procedural questions related to uncertainty and delays in the 501(c)(4) designation process are laid out in the report. Of the IG's nine recommendations, the IRS has agreed to implement seven of them, and has proposed alternatives for the remaining two (the disagreements are over how to document the reasons that applications are chosen for review and how to train IRS specialists on the issue). 
   
   Unless significant further evidence comes out, however, this doesn't look like the rot went particularly deep. The most cynical interpretation of the facts of the case laid out by the IG are that a group of mid-level IRS employees created a politically motivated screening process for 501(c)(4) applications. They were stopped, twice, by IRS management, and procedures were put in place to ensure they couldn't do anything like it again. The employees failed, but the system seems to have worked, though not before a lot of groups received some pretty shabby treatment.
target: – 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.