House Republicans are weighing a major expansion of their investigation into the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservatives by looking into the audits of nonprofit groups, potentially opening another front in the scandal.
Several leaders of 501(c)(3) groups find it fishy that they were audited by the IRS about the same time the agency increased scrutiny of applications from tea party and conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.
Morton C. Blackwell, president of the Virginia-based Leadership Institute, said the audits had a chilling effect as the fear of triggering additional, time-consuming scrutiny prevented groups from participating in otherwise permissible activities during the hotly contested 2012 presidential election cycle.
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