WASHINGTON, December 24 (Sputnik) — The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) continues to target and silence conservative groups as part of a scheme that Congress should stop, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots Jenny Beth Martin, has stressed in a statement.
"There is no question that the IRS as an agency, and its leaders individually, directed and implemented a scheme to silence and demoralize tea party groups," Martin said in a statement released Tuesday.
"The truth is that it is still going on," the Tea Party leader emphasized.
Martin's comments came just hours after the US House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a report that concluded that IRS employees have conspired to deny tax exempt status to conservative organizations in the United States because of their political beliefs, regardless of the organizations' meeting the requirements of the federal tax code or not.
"We only hope that the next Congress will take this report and finish the job," Martin said Tuesday, calling on Congress "to pass legislation to rein in the out-of-control IRS once and for all".
According to Martin, the Tea Party group was aware of the IRS scheme well before any government bodies publicly confirmed it.
"We want the IRS and Treasury to hear us loud and clear: we are not going away, we will not be silenced and we will continue to fight every effort they devise to target and intimidate our movement," Martin stressed in the Tuesday statement.
The oversight committee's report is not the final report on the IRS targeting scandal, but it is the most comprehensive to date, according to the committee, some members of which received the report Monday night, before it was released to the public on Tuesday.
The IRS is the revenue service of the US federal government responsible for collecting taxes.
