Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of an appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the IRS, said the practice was an "outrageous violation of the public trust" that could undermine the agency's credibility.

IRS officials acknowledged that party affiliation information was routinely collected by a vendor for several months. They told the vendor last month to screen the information out.

Oddly, the contractor was not named in news articles.  

Murray's office found 20 states in which the IRS (or its contractor) had collected party affiliation info: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin.

Voter-registration data is public info in many states, but why would the IRS want it?

Maybe, the contractor wanted the info for its own purposes and inadvertently passed it along to the IRS.  In that case, tax dollars paid that contractor to do its other business---which may amount to contractor fraud.

This situation came to light after Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, told IRS officials about it last month.  IRS Deputy Commissioner John Dalrymple wrote the following to Kelley:

"the IRS makes no use of any information related to political party affiliation because IRS rules prohibit such usage," he wrote. "The only portion of voter registration information that is used relates to the voter's address."

Officials should answer several questions, before speculations run wilder:  

1.   Who was the contractor?

2.  Why did the contractor collect such info?

3.  Why did the contractor send that info to the IRS?

4.  How long has this been going on?