IRS officials handed government contracts to tax-dodging corporations

The scandal-plagued Internal Revenue Service has evidently been so busy abusing conservative groups and losing former employee Lois Lerner’s emails that it didn’t realize that it has awarded millions of dollars’ worth of government contracts to tax delinquent companies in recent years.

That’s according to a report out recently from the Treasury Inspector General, first publicized by Judicial Watch.

The IG report notes that, despite the 2012 Consolidated Appropriations Act prohibiting federal agencies from doing business with corporations with federal tax debt or felony convictions, the agency entered into nearly five dozen contracts with firms owing significant debts in fiscal 2012 and 2013.

From the report:

TIGTA identified 17 corporations that were awarded a total of 57 contracts valued at about $18.8 million (including nearly $18 million for contract modifications) during FYs 2012 and 2013, while they had Federal tax debt.

According to the IG, the IRS awarded the contracts because it failed to put adequate controls in place to comply with the Consolidated Appropriations Act. That’s surprising, considering that the IRS would seemingly be the go-to agency for finding out whether a potential federal contractor should be disqualified for tax delinquency.

It’s also worth noting that the agency, which exists to ask individuals and businesses all manner of income and tax related questions to determine how much they owe each year, completely disregarded Department of Treasury requirements to “insert specific language in solicitations requiring corporations to assert whether or not they have certain Federal tax debt and/or felony convictions.”

Judicial Watch, an organization at the forefront of exposing the IRS’s recent scandals, said of the IG findings which have gotten little play in mainstream media: “It may seem like a bad joke, that the nation’s feared tax agency does business with companies that cheat it and violate its mission. At the very least it’s ironic, though the IRS has been embroiled in so many scandals recently that this may seem unworthy of coverage.”

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