The Internal Revenue Service is under fire for inappropriately targeting conservative groups that sought tax-exempt status. …
Some conservatives, however, are alleging that there is another component to the scandal. … “The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote on Thursday, describing the I.R.S.’s actions as the “worst Washington scandal since Watergate.” …
Ms. Noonan is surely correct that many conservative taxpayers were audited. … However, it’s also likely that hundreds of thousands of Mr. Obama’s supporters were audited. Although the percentage of taxpayers who are audited is relatively low — about 1 percent — the number of taxpayers in the United States is so large that this still yields well more than a million audits every year, across the political spectrum. [cont.]
Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight (NYT)