IRS scandal fizzles like a wet firecracker

After a lot of poking around, The New York Times has found that the IRS scandal is coming up quite a bit short on the bottom line.
Not only did the tax-exempt status division target both conservative and liberal groups (though certainly far more conservatives), but most of the ineptitude by the agency's Cincinnati office was aimed at a wide array of nonprofit groups that have no connections at all to politics.

Here's a portion of the Times' report:

"Two months of investigation by Congress and the IRS has produced new documents that have clouded much of the controversy’s narrative. In the more complicated picture now emerging, many organizations other than conservative groups were singled out: “progressive” organizations, medical marijuana purveyors, organizations formed to carry out President Obama’s health care law, and open source software developers who create software tools for computer code writers and distribute them free of charge. 
Apparently, the software group's were given an especially hard time by the IRS crew.

Meanwhile, here are the numbers that show the overall picture:      

"According to the Treasury (Department's) inspector general for tax administration, the IRS received 199,689 applications for tax-exempt status between 2010 and 2012. In 2012 alone, the agency received 73,319, of which about 22,000 were not approved in the initial review process. The inspector general looked at 296 applications flagged as potentially being from political groups. That means most of the applications pulled aside for further scrutiny in those years had nothing to do with politics, conservative or liberal, just as most of the red flags thrown up by the IRS’s lookout lists were not overtly political."

 

As a result of all this, some congressional Republicans are now conceding that this whole bureaucratic mess probably was not politically motivated and it has no ties to the White House.

 

btw: It could also now be said that GOP Rep. Steven King of Iowa, who has said a lot of dumb things in recent years, may have made the stupidest political statement in U.S. history when he declared in May that the IRS scandal was 10 times bigger than Watergate and Iran-Contra combined.