WHEREAS, On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), which requires most United States citizens and legal residents to have health insurance, specifies a minimum benefit design for insurance coverage, creates state-based American Health Benefit Exchanges through which individuals can purchase coverage with premium and cost-sharing credits, requires employers to pay penalties for employees who receive tax credits for health insurance through an Exchange, imposes new regulations on health plans in the Exchanges and in the individual and small group markets, permits states to expand Medicaid, and provides the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with numerous new responsibilities; and

WHEREAS, The ACA gives the IRS the unprecedented power to force individual citizens and employers with 50 or more employees to either purchase a health insurance plan designed by Washington D.C. politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists or pay thousands of dollars in fines; and

WHEREAS, In implementing the ACA, the federal government has unleashed the IRS to hunt down and fine otherwise law-abiding individuals and employers; and

WHEREAS, The IRS has requested funding for 1,954 new agents and the creation of the largest personal information database the federal government has ever attempted, the Federal Data Service Hub, in order to decide who is complying with the law, who will be fined, who will receive hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits, and how much each health insurer will pay as a part of a new annual $8 billion tax; and

WHEREAS, Employers must begin recording the aggregate cost of employer-sponsored medical coverage on every employee’s IRS Form W-2; and

WHEREAS, The IRS, in order to implement the ACA, will receive information from insurers and taxpayers to prove whether each citizen purchased an insurance policy this year, whether the specific insurance policy meets specific government requirements, whether the citizen is “a member of a recognized religious sect” and therefore exempt from the individual mandate, and whether the citizen and members of his or her family are working full-time or part-time; and

WHEREAS, Because provisions of the employer mandate mean that an employer can be fined by the IRS in certain circumstances if the employer’s employee qualifies for a subsidy from an exchange due to changes in the employee’s personal circumstances, such as a spouse’s lost coverage or a divorce, employers seeking to avoid the IRS fine will be forced to demand detailed household income information from their employees, which would result in an unnecessary loss of an employee’s and his or her family’s privacy; and

WHEREAS, In early 2012, the Inspector General for Tax Administration began an audit that files using acceptable government accounting standards to review case files; and

WHEREAS, The Inspector General for Tax Administration reported that in 2010, the IRS “developed and used criteria to identify potential political cases for review that inappropriately identified specific groups applying for tax-exempt status based on their names and policy positions…”; and

WHEREAS, The Inspector General’s report found that the IRS developed and began using criteria to review specific groups applying for tax-exempt status based on their names or policy positions instead of developing nonbiased criteria based on the tax laws and Treasury Regulations; and

WHEREAS, According to the Inspector General’s report, on January 15, 2012, the Internal Revenue Service decided to target “political action type organizations involved in limiting or expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and social economic reform movement”; and

WHEREAS, Lois G. Lerner, the Internal Revenue Service official who oversaw tax-exempt groups, first revealed publicly on May 10, 2013, that IRS personnel had targeted the groups; and

WHEREAS, Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS official who ran the scandal-ridden tax-exempt organizations division between 2009–2012 now runs the agency’s Affordable Care Act office; and

WHEREAS, It is inappropriate and unacceptable for one of the most powerful government agencies to target various groups for political purposes; now, therefore, be it