Josh Barro, Columnist

There Is No Good Fix for the IRS Tea Party Problem

The IRS has been given an impossible task: figure out which organizations have missions that are âprimarily political.âÂ

May 13, 2013 at 10:35 PM UTC

By Josh Barro

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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My colleagues Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas wrote about the Internal Revenue Service's Tea Party scandal this morning:

That's a nice thought. But is such a test even possible? The IRS didn't make this mess because its employees are stupid or because they have a political vendetta. It's because they've been given an impossible task: figure out which organizations have missions that are "primarily political" -- and come up with definitions for "primarily" and "political" that are neither vague nor politically charged.