Stephen Moore, in a Fox News opinion column dated August 6, describes an Internal Revenue Service that became, in his phrase, "judge, jury, and executioner," and casts its enforcement of one tax shelter as a "witch hunt" against Americans. [1] The column rests on a real document, and the document says something narrower than the headline.
Start with what Moore gets right, because he gets the specifics right. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported on May 1 that the IRS backdated 7 penalty approvals in its syndicated conservation-easement cases and conceded more than 68 million dollars in penalties as a result. [2] Moore's own figures, 68 million dollars and 7 backdated approvals, track the inspector general's. Backdating a supervisory approval is not a paperwork quibble. Section 6751(b) exists precisely so a penalty cannot be assessed without a timely sign-off, and an agency that falsified those dates broke the rule it enforces on everyone else. On that count, the outrage is earned.
The same report sets the scale the language leaves out. TIGTA reviewed 829 syndicated-easement cases. It found 13 non-compliant with the approval rule, about 1.6 percent, and 7 of those involved backdating, under 1 percent of the sample. [2] The IRS agreed to all 5 of the inspector general's recommendations. [2] A finding that fewer than 2 sampled cases in 100, in one niche shelter program, broke a timing rule, and that the agency conceded the penalties and accepted every fix, is the raw material Moore turns into "judge, jury, and executioner" over the whole tax code.
That is the move worth naming. "Judge, jury, and executioner" and "witch hunt" are whole-agency verdicts. The record beneath them is a bounded, self-corrected finding in a single enforcement lane. The distance between the two is the entire argument. A reader can hold, at once, that the backdating was serious, that the supervisors responsible should face consequences, and that 13 flawed cases out of 829 does not indict the institution that collects the revenue for the entire federal government.
This is a columnist's characterization, not a factual rating, and it is labeled that way here. Set beside the inspector general's numbers, the framing asks readers to distrust the whole IRS on the strength of an audit the IRS itself accepted and moved to fix. The beneficiary is the case for defunding tax enforcement. The cost lands on every taxpayer who files honestly and needs that same agency to make the shelter buyers pay.
