One Ramona man’s experience with IRS

By Tom Stephan

In 2010 I applied for a 501(c)(3) status to breed a California endangered species called the Harris’s Hawk. I wished to see that species fly wild again in Southern California just like when I was a kid.

I planned to breed them in captivity, something I was already doing, with eventual release of the progeny back to the wild. This because there was only a single breeding pair left in the state.

That nest site happens to be less than a mile from Obama’s new “green” solar project in Jacumba, San Diego County, a project destroying nesting Golden Eagle habitat now.

My application was just after the first Tea Party protest in Ramona, held at the U.S Postal Service, a protest I attended. It was invigorating redressing my government for this endless war and the tax and spend policy to fund it. Weapons of mass destruction, my @ss. The Industrial War Complex banker elitists just wanted the Iraqi oil. Plain and simple. Bush baby, their puppet.

The postal service protest reminded me of the Vietnam protests when I was in high school. “I am mad as hell and I won’t take it anymore.” I was then and still am for the same reason.

I could not understand why months would go by and I could not get the U.S. government to respond to my application. I had to use my CPA repeatedly to force a response. That response was a constant request for yet more information.

Apparently I had exhausted all the questions in their little book, as they started all over again from the top with the first questions, as if they had not received the second and third, etc., answers — the “royal run around.” I never did get a real response and so never could get a yes or no.

Later that same year I was audited by the IRS. One of my accountants, upon hearing of this, asked me if I was a member of the National Rifle Association. I am and have been for decades. He said that the IRS was targeting NRA members. I was incredulous. These are tactics reserved by the mafia!

Now in the mainstream news I find that the IRS has been unfairly targeting constitutionally based organizations like the Tea Party and Congressman Ron Paul’s “Campaign for Liberty.”

“What is this country coming to?” a friend asked of me when I told him of my trials. Where has it gone is the real question.

“Freedom is not free” — It’s gone.