It appears that the Bushites are entrenched at the IRS.  

Five years ago, under the Bush regime, it introduced a new quota system that has the hallmarks of a typical Bushite scam protecting corporate cronies.

Annie Lowery at The Washington Independent has more on this unjust, unfair program.

"....The recession continued to batter individuals and families in 2009, with income falling and unemployment rising. But corporate profits started to rebound — nowhere more spectacularly than in the financial sector. Given those fundamentals, one might imagine that the Internal Revenue Service would focus more on corporations than individuals or small businesses.

"But a new report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research group affiliated with Syracuse University, shows that throughout the downturn, the agency has gone after fewer and fewer big businesses and more and more mom-and-pop outfits — the traditional engine of job growth.

"Five years ago, the IRS instituted a “perverse quota system,” according to TRAC, pressuring auditors to complete more audits, rather than to recover more tax losses or to go further in depth. As a result, auditors turned away from more complicated and larger companies, despite clear evidence that they can defraud the federal government for much more vast amounts than their smaller counterparts. In 2009, the IRS performed audits on only around 25 percent of the biggest corporations — representing the lowest audit-rate in 20 years. Since 2005, the IRS has audited 22 percent fewer big businesses and allocated 33 percent fewer hours to looking at big-company books. Time spent on small businesses and the number of small businesses examined, on the other hand, have increased.

“ 'The system is perverse and counterproductive,' argues Susan Long, the co-director of TRAC and a professor of managerial statistics at Syracuse. 'The number of revenue agents actually peaked in 1988, and Congress has whittled back [the IRS's] appropriations and thus the amount of hours that they had for agents to look into corporate profits. But we actually looked at a period where Congress was providing more resources to the IRS [between 2005 and 2009], and they still continued to cut back on these kinds of audits.' "

"More troubling, TRAC reports that the IRS is going after fewer financial firms — despite increasing fraud in the run-up to the recession and quickly rebounding corporate profits since then. In 2008, the IRS audited just 15 percent of large financial companies, the low point in a five-year decline.

"And in another sign that individuals, rather than big corporations, will be subject to IRS scrutiny, the agency recently promised to expand audits for new homeowners using the Obama administration’s tax credits – an $8000 credit for first-time buyers and $6500 credit for repeat buyers, available for purchases between January 1, 2009, and April 30, 2010. More than 1.5 million people have claimed the credit, and the IRS has promised to audit those claimants heavily."

The Obama administration must ditch its misguided placatory, conciliatory hype and begin the change we voted for like cleaning out the Bushite Augean stables in Washington.

Voters did not cast their ballots for a continuation of Bush's disastrous policies.