Dazed and confused.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills - Internal Revenue Service scandal

The best coverage of the IRS scandal comes from two articles in the Times by our alumnus Nicholas Confessore and his colleagues, David Kocieniewski and Michael Luo. The first headline reads "Confusion and Staff Troubles Rife at I.R.S. Office in Ohio."

It should be noted that there is reason for the people in Cincinnati to be confused. In the late 1950s, as I believe MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell was the first to point out, the IRS adopted a regulation interpreting the law governing the tax-exempt status of 501(c)(4)s. Instead of requiring that an organization be "exclusively" involved in social welfare, as the law had done, it now required that the organization be only "primarily" involved in such activities. And "primarily" is not as easy a standard to apply as "exclusively."

As the Times story points out, the bureaucrats in Cincinnati charged with carrying out this murky mandate--and processing roughly 70,000 applications for tax exemption each year--were performing a task considered "unglamorous" and avoided by other IRS employees. The Times quotes a former lawyer in the IRS's Washington office saying, "Nobody wants to be a determination agent. It's a job that just about everybody would be anxious to...