At the hearing, Issa asked George to look into where liberal groups were targeted. | AP Photos IRS scrutinized some liberal groups

After a political group in Texas asked the IRS for a tax exemption last year, it got a lengthy, time-consuming list of questions — like a request for the minutes of all the board meetings since the group got started.

And a California-based group got turned down completely in 2011, because the IRS concluded that it was set up “primarily for the benefit of a political party.”


These two stories sound like they’d fit right into the raging IRS scandal over its treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status.

( PHOTOS: 10 slams on the IRS)

The only difference: these two groups — Progress Texas and Emerge America — were unabashedly liberal.

POLITICO surveyed the liberal groups from an IRS list of advocacy organizations that were approved after the tougher examinations started. The review found some examples of liberal groups facing scrutiny similar to their conservative counterparts — they were asked for copies of web pages, actions alerts, and written materials from all of their events.

But those harsh investigations were more rare than what POLITICO had found when it surveyed conservative groups at the beginning of the scandal. And the questions themselves appear less invasive, overall.

So while liberals have some reason to complain about the IRS, the disparity in treatment does help explain why the conservative piece became a runaway story while the liberal side did not.

( PHOTOS: IRS hearing on Capitol Hill)

Plus, many liberal groups just weren’t as bothered by the questions they did get.

Progress Texas was the only one that came forward during the height of the scandal, releasing its own IRS letter to prove it had been hassled, too. It even had a cover letter from Lois Lerner, the embattled IRS official at the center of the scandal.

But even then, its leaders didn’t really feel hassled.

“If you’re going to ask for exceptional treatment, you should expect to go through exceptional screening,” said Ed Espinoza, the executive director of Progress Texas. “We all play by the same rules, and if they don’t like the rules, they don’t have to play.”

( Also on POLITICO: 5 questions for tax inspector general J. Russell George)

At a hearing on Thursday, Rep. Darrell Issa asked the IRS inspector general to look into where liberal groups were targeted. But most of the momentum is behind Congress staying on the trail of the conservative targeting. Top Republicans are trying to pry more information out of the agency about the role of the IRS Chief Counsel’s office, after career IRS officials testified that Lerner sent Tea Party applications there as part of a lengthy review process.

The bottom line is, Republicans have more fuel to keep the scandal alive — and liberal groups just aren’t about to march in the streets.

“In my mind, I didn’t find it to be onerous. I just thought they were doing their due diligence,” said Denise Cardinal of Progress Now, the umbrella organization for state progressive groups like Progress Texas.

Her group was one of the ones that got off easily. Its IRS letter — which came from the same Cincinnati office that investigated the conservative groups — asked just four follow-up questions, mostly about its relationship with its state affiliates.

Cardinal said some of the state groups did get lengthier sets of questions. And Alliance for a Better Utah, one of those state affiliates, is still waiting for the IRS to approve 501(c)(3) status for its education and voter registration operation. That’s causing problems because it can’t apply for foundation and grant money while that application to become a charitable organization is in limbo, according to Maryann Martindale, the group’s executive director.

But the group has gotten its 501(c)(4) approval for its advocacy work — the same kind of tax-exempt status that snagged so many conservative groups. That status is for “social welfare” groups that can participate in politics, but it’s not supposed to be the main thing they do. And Martindale had no problem with the questions her group received in that process.

“I think they all seemed reasonable,” Martindale said. “The way I look at it is, if you’re applying for tax-exempt status, you should come under a certain level of scrutiny.”

The shrugs from many liberal groups may help explain why more of them didn’t come forward during the height of the IRS firestorm. There’s a feeling among some Democrats and liberals that the conservative groups got all the attention, and sparked the inspector general investigation, because they were the louder complainers.

Espinoza says it took Progress Texas 18 months to get its 501(c)(4) approval, longer than some of the Tea Party groups. “Some of the people complaining about the process, theirs took less time than ours did,” he said.

Better Georgia, another Progress Now affiliate, has been waiting for 501(c)(4) approval since February 2012, and has now applied for “expedited” IRS approval, in which it just has to state that most of its activities aren’t political. But “we have not complained about the process, because we believe it’s appropriate when we do some public interest work and some political work,” said board chairman Amy Morton.

And even when Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office, had three state chapters turned down for 501(c)(4) status in 2011 — also with a Lois Lerner cover letter — it just solved the problem by converting all of its organizations into 527 groups, according to co-founder Dana Kennedy.

Those are tax-exempt too, but with a crucial difference: They have to disclose their donors, while 501(c)(4)s don’t.

“We’ve never had any problem disclosing our donors … We’re still operating and doing all the same things we’ve always done,” said Kennedy. “These groups that are screaming really loud, why do they have a problem with becoming 527s?”

The IRS declined to comment for this story.

It’s true that the conservative groups had powerful allies championing their cause — from the American Center for Law and Justice, the legal group that represented some of the Tea Party organizations, to the Republicans that pushed to find out why their applications were delayed.

And there may have been more conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the first place. There’s no definitive ideological breakdown of the 298 groups that were set aside for special IRS scrutiny, but a Tax Analysts study of the 176 organizations that won IRS approval found that 122 likely had conservative leanings, including 46 with “Tea Party,” “Patriots,” and “9/12” in their name.

But it’s also a lot easier to find conservative groups that were singled out for lengthy, intrusive interrogations. The treatment of the liberal groups appears to have been more random. Some had a hard time, but there were plenty that didn’t think their experiences were hellish at all.

For example, they weren’t asked to name their donors, like conservative groups were. Martindale, for example, says the Alliance for a Better Utah was asked a more general question — whether it took donations from any political parties, political candidates or elected officials. But it wasn’t asked for “the names of the donors, contributors and grantors,” as at least two of the conservative groups were.

It was easy for the Utah group to satisfy the IRS, too. “We just said no” — the group wasn’t taking those donations — “and that was the end of the discussion,” said Martindale.

It’s clear that liberal groups were on the agency’s radar. The agency’s infamous “Be On the Look Out” (BOLO) list included the term “progressive” — and Democrats have uncovered evidence that screeners were trained to look for progressive groups as well as “Tea Party,” “Patriots” and “9/12 Project” organizations. At a Thursday hearing, George, the Treasury inspector general, blamed the IRS for not turning those documents over to him during his investigation.

Even groups that weren’t necessarily ideological — like Chi Eta Phi Sorority, an African American nurses group — have gotten caught up in the screening. The group has told congressional Democrats it believes it was singled out because of the phrase “social change” in its mission statement, and has been asked to explain statements on its website about “sisterhood/brotherhood” and “love and caring.” The group’s attorney did not respond to several requests for comment.

But none of the progressive groups contacted by POLITICO said they had been grilled about what they were reading — or asked about their relationships with specific political activists, like Ohio’s Liberty Township Tea Party was when it was asked about Justin Binik-Thomas, a former leader of the Cincinnati Tea Party.

“The questions they asked were pretty neutral,” said Joe Onek of the Committee for a Fair Judiciary, which pressures the Senate to fill judicial vacancies. He said the IRS mostly wanted to know how it would separate its activities from those of the Raben Group, a lobbying group whose founder, Robert Raben, is one of the leaders of the Fair Judiciary group.

The liberal groups’ pattern doesn’t track with the conservative groups, either, which received the most probing questions from the IRS Cincinnati office. The Progress Texas letter with the harsh questions came from an IRS office in Laguna Niguel, California — not Cincinnati.

And some of the other liberal groups that got relatively mild questions received them from the Cincinnati office — including the Middle Class Taxpayers Foundation of San Diego. It was mostly asked structural questions, like how it would make sure the funds from its charitable arm wouldn’t be used for legislative or political activities. The rest were milder inquiries, like: “What is the purpose of professional fees?”

Some of the groups said there are probably strong reasons why they didn’t get stronger scrutiny. Bob Fulkerson, state director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, said it may have just had good timing. He said his group applied for its tax exemption in October 2011, rather than in 2010, so “the IRS didn’t get a chance to make the burdensome requests that we’ve learned other groups were subjected to.”

Onek said the Fair Judiciary group probably didn’t trigger harsher screening because the name doesn’t make it obvious that it’s a progressive organization — although since it’s pushing to “fill the vacancies” that President Barack Obama has been trying to fill for months, “you wouldn’t have to read very far to figure out where we were coming from.”

And Progressives United, a Wisconsin-based group, had a built-in advantage. It was founded by former Sen. Russ Feingold, the co-author of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law — and staffed with attorneys who know the law so well that they were able to anticipate virtually every IRS question when they sent in the application.

“We actually didn’t get any questions,” said Josh Orton, the group’s spokesman. “We didn’t go into this blind.”