If you wonder why Cincinnati became the go-to IRS office for non-profit exemption review, the answer’s really simple:
The IRS was having trouble hiring people for low-level positions in field offices like New York or Atlanta — the kinds of workers that typically reviewed applications by nonprofits, Owens said.The answer to this was simple: Cincinnati.
The city had a history of being able to hire people at low federal grades, which in 1995 paid between $19,704 and $38,814 a year — almost the same as those federal grades paid in New York City or Chicago.
[snip]
So in 1995, the Exempt Organizations division started to centralize. Instead of field offices evaluating applications for nonprofits in each region, those applications would all be sent to one mailing address, a post-office box in Covington, Ky. Then a central office in Cincinnati would review all the applications.
Almost inadvertently, because people there were willing to work for less than elsewhere, Cincinnati became ground zero for nonprofit applications.
And then, thanks to a reorganization in the late 1990s – early 2000s, the IRS started reducing its number of employees (from over 100,000 to slightly under 90,000). With fewer people came less attention to what was happening in field offices and reassignment of lawyers to special projects rather than ongoing practices like the Exempt Organizations reviews.
So far, then, it seems that the IRS snafu is more a management and resource problem than it is a partisan political one. Does that fact matter to Republicans? Hardly.