The Obama administration, four short months into its second term, finds itself beset by three political storms.

Republicans in Congress, some Democrats and the press are pelting the White House with questions about the raid on an American post in Libya, the conduct of the Internal Revenue Service and the seizure of phone records from The Associated Press.

Taken together, the three have consumed the week in Washington. Here’s a quick guide.

BENGHAZI

The basics: Four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya, were killed in a raid on a diplomatic post in the city of Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. The State Department ultimately determined that the raid was a series of terrorist attacks.

Republicans have made an array of accusations, including that the administration failed to send the military to help, waited too long to consistently describe the raid as a terror attack, and extensively edited talking points for media appearances.

The White House response: President Barack Obama, exasperated, dismissed the Republican furor over the talking points earlier this week as a politically motivated “sideshow.”

The administration has also said that sending the military was logistically impossible and would have left other American interests undefended. Obama said within hours of the raid that “acts of terror” would not be tolerated. On Thursday, he pledged increased security for diplomatic posts.

Accused of changing its public stance on the raid because of political reasons — the presidential election was less than two weeks away — the administration released 100 pages of emails and other documents Wednesday shedding light on how the talking points were changed.

The stakes: The political stakes are increasingly focused on Hillary Clinton’s potential run for the presidency in 2016. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. and himself a possible candidate, accused Clinton of “dereliction of duty” at a speech in Iowa over the weekend.

American Crossroads, Karl Rove’s political action committee, released an ad draping Clinton in dark shadows and grainy black-and-white photos and accusing her of a cover-up. The ad ends with an invitation to donate to American Crossroads.

What’s next: More questions from Republicans, despite the administration’s insistence that there is little if anything left to explain.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who has accused the administration of lying and believing itself to be above the law, wants to interview former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, one of the leaders of the review board.

THE IRS

The basics: Employees of the Internal Revenue Service singled out Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations for special scrutiny in reviewing applications for tax exemption.

Republicans want to know whether anyone in the administration knew about it — to date there is no evidence that they did — and have suggested the government was punishing political enemies.

The White House stance: Obama on Wednesday ousted the acting head of the IRS, Steven Miller, and said: “Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it.”

The president acted after a Treasury Department investigation faulted the IRS for using “inappropriate criteria” in picking which organizations to scrutinize. The report also said that “ineffective management” allowed the criteria to stay in place.

Asked Thursday whether he supported the appointment of a special prosecutor, Obama said he believed working with Congress to investigate would be sufficient.

The stakes: Republicans and Democrats alike have expressed. Republicans appear to be coalescing around an insistence that it shows a pattern of intimidation by the administration.

“The unifying themes of this town are an arrogance and view of the machinery of government to be a tool of partisanship,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas and a Tea Party favorite, said Thursday.

Besides demanding hearings, they are likely to use that argument in the 2014 midterm elections. In addition, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said that the IRS ordeal could hurt the push for immigration reform in Congress.

“We’ve already faced tremendous suspicion about the federal government’s ability or willingness to enforce the law,” Rubio said.

What’s next: Attorney General Eric Holder has pledged a nationwide investigation. Federal prosecutors are looking at potential violations of law, including civil rights statutes and a federal law that restricts political activities by federal employees.

There are at least three congressional hearings scheduled, beginning with the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday.

AP PHONE RECORDS

The basics: The Justice Department secretly seized two months of records from more than 20 telephone lines used by reporters and editors for The Associated Press last year.

The seizure was apparently connected to a federal investigation into who leaked classified information about a foiled terror plot in Yemen that the AP reported on in May 2012. The AP has angrily objected and demanded further explanation.

The White House stance: The deputy attorney general who is overseeing the investigation insisted in a letter to the AP that the seizure was limited in scope and that the content of calls was not monitored.

Holder, who has recused himself from the investigation, said Tuesday that the leak “put the American people at risk” and was among the most serious he has seen in 37 years as a prosecutor.

The stakes: Media organizations have said that the seizure will intimidate whistle-blowers. As in the IRS furor, Republicans are seeking to portray an administration bent on overreaching. Democrats have joined the criticism, too.

Sen. Jon Tester of Montana said Wednesday that the Justice Department’s steps were “a blatant violation of privacy, and directly interfere with the constitutionally protected rights of the press to do its job free from government intrusion or direction.”

What’s next: Under fire, the Obama administration is pushing to revive legislation that would enhance protections for journalists when they refuse to name confidential sources.

A White House official called Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to ask him to reintroduce the legislation, known as a media shield law. Schumer said that the bill at least would have ensured a fairer process in the AP leak.

But Obama stressed Thursday that he makes no apology for being concerned about leaks that jeopardize American missions.

This story was originally published on Thu May 16, 2013 1:35 PM EDT

President Obama won't leave the top job at the Internal Revenue Service vacant for long.

NBC News has confirmed from a senior administration official that the president plans to appoint a new acting IRS commissioner this week.  

Obama said Wednesday that he was "angry" at IRS officials who inappropriately targeted conservative groups for scrutiny when he announced that his administration had sought and accepted Steven Miller's resignation as interim commissioner of the IRS.

"I've reviewed the Treasury Department watchdog's report, and the misconduct that it uncovered was inexcusable," Obama said in a statement at the White House.

"It's inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I'm angry about it."

The president said that he expected the IRS to act with even higher levels of integrity than other government agencies and that, to that end, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had sought and accepted Miller's resignation — something many Republicans had demanded.

Obama's remarks came amid news that two IRS employees who had engaged in activities targeting conservative groups had faced disciplinary action for their conduct.

The inspector general's release Monday found that incompetence and ineffective management at the tax-collecting agency led to employees' applying extra scrutiny to conservative and Tea Party advocacy groups. The report also found there was no evidence of outside pressure on officials to target conservative groups.

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Alex Wong / Getty Images

President Barack Obama speaks during a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron at White House on Monday.

Outrage intensified in Washington on Monday over the disclosure that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.

President Barack Obama, at a White House appearance with the British prime minister, said that he wanted all the facts but used strong terms to condemn the reported conduct.

“I’ve got no patience with it. I will not tolerate it,” he said. “And we will make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this.”

The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration will release an audit report later this week. In the meantime, here are five big unanswered questions looming over the IRS.

How did this start and why?

In January 2010, a Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United touched off a flood of political spending, much of it classified under a section of tax law known as 501(c)4 that entitles certain “social welfare” groups to tax exemption.

Two months later, a special unit of the IRS in Cincinnati assigned to screen applications for 501(c)4 status began searching for groups with descriptions that included “Tea Party” and “Patriots,” according to a partial draft of the inspector general’s report obtained by NBC News.

Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division on tax-exempt organizations, said Friday that the targeting of conservative groups was “inappropriate” but “absolutely not” influenced by the White House. She also said that none of the targeted groups was denied tax-exempt status.

What has not been spelled out is who in the Cincinnati office decided to search for conservative groups and why.

At least one Tea Party group called on the administration Monday to appoint a special prosecutor to look into the matter, which it called “un-American and Nixonesque.” One of the articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon accused him of targeting political opponents for tax audits.

Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress are determined to investigate.

“I just don’t buy that this was a couple of rogue IRS employees,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Sunday on the CNN program “State of the Union.”

Who knew what, and when, higher in the IRS?

Lerner learned in June 2011 that agents had targeted groups with names including “Tea Party” and “Patriots,” according to the draft obtained by NBC News.

She “instructed that the criteria immediately be revised,” according to the draft. Ten months later, in March 2012, the IRS commissioner at the time, Douglas Shulman, testified to Congress that the IRS was not targeting tax-exempt groups based on their politics.

The IRS said over the weekend that senior executives were not aware of the targeting, but it remains unclear who knew what and when. Shulman, who left the agency last fall, has not spoken publicly about the scandal and did not answer a request for comment Monday from NBC News.

Members of Congress had sent letters to Shulman as early as June 2011 asking specifically about targeting of conservative groups, according to a House Ways and Means Committee summary obtained by NBC News.

The IRS responded at least six times but made no mention of targeting conservatives, according to the committee’s summary.

Will anyone be fired?

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., on Monday demanded the resignation of the head of the IRS. That is Steven Miller, who is serving as acting commissioner until Obama nominates a replacement.

The last commissioner was Shulman, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2008, left the agency in November and has taken a position as a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution.

Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker, told MSNBC on Monday that Obama should say “he’s going to fire everybody he can legally fire who’s been involved with this.”

How will the White House contain the political damage?

The IRS scandal presents a daunting political challenge for the White House, which is already being forced to defend its handling of the deadly attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, last September.

The furor over the IRS has come from both parties. Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said Monday the agency had committed an “outrageous abuse of power” and pledged a grilling.

“The IRS will now be the ones put under additional scrutiny,” he said.

Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia called it inexcusable, and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said the president “must immediately condemn this attack on our values and find those individuals in his administration who are responsible and fire them.”

How can this be prevented in the future?

Rubio, in his letter calling for the resignation of the IRS chief, called the behavior “seemingly unconstitutional and potentially criminal.”

But under existing law, the worst that can happen to an IRS agent who discriminates against taxpayers is getting fired, said Rep. Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican who sits on the House Oversight Committee.

Turner introduced a bill Monday to increase the toughest penalty to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

“This is about protecting the rights of all Americans and their ability to freely express their political thoughts,” he said.

Kelly O’Donnell of NBC News contributed to this report. Reuters and The Associated Press also contributed.

This story was originally published on Mon May 13, 2013 5:18 PM EDT

Keith Srakocic / AP

Pittsburgh Police Chief Nate Harper, seen in May 2011.

PITTSBURGH - Former city police Chief Nate Harper will plead guilty to charges that he conspired to steal city police funds deposited into unauthorized police credit union accounts and failed to file federal tax returns from 2008 to 2011, his attorneys said Friday.

Harper's lawyers made the announcement at a news conference on a day of fast-moving developments in the federal investigation after prosecutors announced the grand jury indictment, Harper pleaded not guilty to the charges at an arraignment, and the judge said the former chief could remain free.

U.S. Attorney David Hickton called Harper's actions "the worst kind of public corruption," and said it was "a sad day" for authorities who had worked closely with the soft-spoken, generally well-liked and seemingly humble man on issues ranging from gang violence and security for the G-20 economic summit in 2009.

"This is puzzling and baffling behavior," Hickton said.

Later, Harper begged off appearing at the news conference at the last minute because he was "embarrassed and distraught," defense attorney Robert DelGreco said. The 36-year police veteran has lost 20 pounds since Mayor Luke Ravenstahl demanded his resignation Feb. 20 after meeting with the FBI about the investigation, Harper's attorneys said. 

But the former chief, who came up through the ranks of Pittsburgh's roughly 800-officer force and was chief since 2006, takes "full responsibility" for his actions, said Robert Leight, another Harper attorney.

"I think we're prepared to plead to that indictment without modification," DelGreco said.

The indictment alleges the 60-year-old Harper conspired with unnamed others to divert more than $70,000 from a city account into two unauthorized credit union accounts, then spent nearly $32,000 of that himself. It includes a single charge of conspiracy and four counts of willfully failing to file income tax returns.

Although the federal crimes carry a maximum combined penalty of nine years in prison, Harper's attorneys said guidelines dictate a likely sentence of 10 to 16 months - low enough for them to argue for probation or alternative incarceration, like house arrest.

Hickton wouldn't comment Friday on a likely sentence. He said the investigation is continuing, although he wouldn't say whether the mayor or other city personnel are targeted.

Ravenstahl denies any wrongdoing or being a target of the probe, although he's acknowledged two bodyguards, also city officers, used debit cards from the same credit union accounts. The 33-year-old mayor has decided not to run for re-election, citing the toll on his family from the scandal.

In statements Friday, Ravenstahl and interim police Chief Regina McDonald said the indictment against Harper was "sad." They said they are working to bolster confidence in the police bureau.

The investigation centers on a $3.85 hourly fee that bars, restaurants and other businesses pay the city when they hire off-duty officers to work security details. The money is collected on top of whatever hourly wage the officers are paid and, by law, must be kept in city-controlled accounts and spent only on certain types of police business.

Instead, Harper helped open the credit union accounts from which he spent $31,987 - mostly at restaurants, bars and department stores - using two Visa debit cards to make automatic teller machine withdrawals and purchases, Hickton said.

Harper's attorneys said the former chief was somewhat "naive" and may have believed at first that it was OK to open the unauthorized accounts because the money was still being spent on police-related business, including a massive Gatorade purchase to quench the thirst of officers brought in to handle the G-20 protests, for example.

At some point, however, Harper began spending the money on himself, which DelGreco said Harper understands was "unambiguously and indefensibly" wrong.

The attorneys hinted that Harper, who has three daughters and five grandchildren, exhausted his wages on his family and became tempted by the credit union funds.

"I think the lure of the unmonitored accessibility of that account proved to be an irresistible temptation," DelGreco said.

The attorneys said Harper didn't fail to file his tax returns to hide the money, but simply because of "procrastination" and "personal issues" that took precedence. Among other things, three city police officers were fatally gunned down in April 2009 - when the first of Harper's delinquent tax returns would have been due - and Harper never got back on track in handling his personal affairs, the attorneys said.

The indictment grew out of another federal investigation in which a former city employee has already pleaded guilty to taking $6,000 in bribes to help a business owned by a man Harper has described as a former friend land a $327,000 contract to install computers and radios in squad cars in 2007.

Harper continues to deny taking bribes or making money from that contract, Leight said. But as investigators poked into Harper's finances to see if he had any unexplained income from that scheme, Harper told investigators about money he stole from the police fees fund, Leight said.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. 

Nobody's going to win an Emmy for a parody of the TV show "Star Trek" filmed by Internal Revenue Service employees at an agency studio in Maryland. 

An 83-year-old Massachusetts man on Tuesday was sentenced to pay back millions in penalties and back taxes for spending years hiding his wealth from the Internal Revenue System in Swiss Bank Accounts.

Jacques Wajsfelner hid $5.7 million from U.S. tax authorities, failing to file Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts Reports from 2006 to 2011.

A judge in a federal court in Manhattan ordered Wajsfelner to pay a civil penalty of $2.8 million and $419,940 in back taxes. He was also given sixth months of probation, including three months of home confinement, authorities said.

Wajsfelner’s financial adviser Beda Singenberger was charged in July 2011 with conspiring with U.S. taxpayers to hide more than $184 million in various Swiss banks. The case against Singenberger is still pending.

The German-born Wajsfelner opened an account in his own name at Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, beginning in 1995.

In 2006, authorties believe Singenberger helped Wajsfelner open an undeclared account at the Swiss bank using the name of the fake corporation “Ample Lion.”

“By opening the Ample Lion account at Credit Suisse, Wajsfelner was attempting to obscure his ownership of the assets in the account from the IRS,” said a statement released by Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

In the fall of 2008, Credit Suisse ended its U.S. cross-border banking business, and in order to continue hiding money he opened an account with Swiss bank Wegelin. By the end of 2010 the account was valued at $5.5 million.

On Monday, Wegelin was and ordered to pay nearly $58 million to the United States for their role in the tax evasion schemes.

WASHINGTON - A tax whistleblower received a $2 million reward from the Internal Revenue Service for his role uncovering an alleged multimillion-dollar tax-avoidance scheme attempted by Illinois Tool Works Inc in the late 1990s, the whistleblower's lawyer said on Thursday.

The informant, a Wall Street banker who remained anonymous to protect his career, previously received two other million-dollar payouts from the IRS, said his attorney, Erika Kelton, with Phillips & Cohen in Washington.

His reward last week could have been larger if his claims were brought forward under newer IRS whistleblower rules revamped in 2006, she said.

Informants to the IRS only receive rewards after taxes are collected, based on the information they provide. This whistleblower filed his claim with the IRS in 2001.

It was unclear how much Illinois Tool Works paid the IRS in taxes based on the whistleblower's tips. In a news release, Kelton estimated the company could have paid $383 million to the IRS, based on tax liabilities in U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

1995 transaction
Alison Donnelly, an Illinois Tool Works spokeswoman, said in response to the news release that it appeared to refer to a 1995 transaction that a former ITW business segment engaged in with an investment bank.

"As part of the IRS's normal audits of ITW's tax returns, the tax treatment of this transaction was fully resolved without penalty with the IRS in 2009, and resulted in no significant financial impact to ITW," she said in an emailed statement.

Illinois Tool Works, based in the Chicago suburb of Glenview, makes a variety of items, including restaurant supplies, construction products, electronic components, auto parts and industrial packaging.

An IRS spokesman said the agency could not comment due to taxpayer privacy laws.

The agency paid $8 million in whistleblower awards in fiscal year 2011 and collected $48 million in taxes from their tips, according to IRS figures.

Whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld, who received a record-setting IRS award of $104 million that was paid in September, has prompted a rush of would-be imitators hoping to reap big payouts for exposing tax cheats, whistleblower lawyers have said.

Birkenfeld's tips led Swiss bank UBS AG to settle with U.S. regulators in 2009 for $780 million in fines, penalties, interest and restitution.

Following Birkenfeld's award announcement, "there's a renewed confidence among whistleblowers" in the IRS, Kelton said. "The inquiries to our firm from potential tax whistleblowers has again picked up," she said.

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Treasury Department investigators say the Internal Revenue Service is looking the other way instead of rooting out fraud when people apply for taxpayer identification numbers.

The ID numbers are used instead of a Social Security number by non-citizens who have to file tax returns. Almost 3 million returns were filed under the program last year.

The Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration says instead of worrying about fraud, IRS managers focused on how many applications they could process and did away with fraud-detection measures that had been working.

All applications for ID numbers are processed at an IRS center in Austin, Texas.

IRS officials responding to the report say they've taken steps to rectify the problem and are reviewing other possible changes. 

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Handout via Reuters

Pastor Jim Garlow Garlow not only intends to break IRS rules for political endorsements by religious organizations, he also plans to spend the next four months recruiting other pastors to do the same.

 Pastor Jim Garlow will stand before congregants at his 2,000-seat Skyline Wesleyan Church in La Mesa, California, on Sunday, October 7, just weeks before the U.S. presidential and congressional elections, and urge his flock to vote for or against particular candidates.

He knows such pulpit pleading could endanger his church's tax-exempt status by violating IRS rules for a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. A charity can take a position on policy issues but cannot act "on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office." To cross that line puts the $7 million mega-church's tax break at risk.

Even so, Garlow not only intends to break the rules, he also plans to spend the next four months recruiting other pastors to do the same as part of Pulpit Freedom Sunday. On that day each year since 2008, ministers intentionally try to provoke the IRS. Some even send DVD recordings of their sermons to the agency.

Last year, 539 pastors participated. This year organizers expect far more. Participants want to force the matter to court as a freedom of speech and religion issue.

"I believe we're on the early stages of the next great awakening," Garlow told his congregation last year. "We're going to see it just sweep across this nation."

The situation is fraught with peril for the IRS, which needs to be seen as apolitical. When it cracks down on political activities proscribed by the 501(c)(3) regulations, it is inevitably branded as partisan.

When the target is a church, mosque or synagogue, enforcement puts two fundamental American values at odds: freedom of speech and the separation of church and state. Although the agency has enforced the tax-exemption rules against churches in the past, it has so far ignored the provocations of Freedom Sunday.

The IRS has also been silent about the increasingly aggressive political activity of the U.S. Catholic bishops, who have called for their own Fortnight for Freedom this week. Masses, rallies, and parish bulletins are being mobilized against the Obama administration's healthcare regulations on contraceptives.

The result of agency inaction, according to tax experts and former IRS staffers, will be a lot more electioneering by leaders of the faithful, in local races as well as national, and to the benefit of Democrats as well as Republicans.

"It will get worse unless the IRS takes action, and they seem reluctant," said Nicholas Cafardi, dean emeritus and professor of law at Duquesne University and the longtime lawyer for the Catholic diocese of Pittsburgh.

Cafardi called the current state of affairs "toxic" in its mingling of the two worlds. Many religious leaders do not support the trend toward more political involvement by organized religion and worry it will undercut their moral authority.

The money involved is enormous. Combined, federal tax breaks on donations to churches and exemptions from state and local property taxes likely add up to something on the order of $25 billion in lost revenue each year.

Last year churches received $96 billion in tax-free contributions, according to estimates compiled by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

Unlike other types of charities, churches do not have to file financial statements with the government. There are only rough estimates of church endowment or investment income, which is also tax-free and believed to be larger than annual contributions.

Using tax data from the U.S. Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation and data on giving to churches from the Indiana Center, a Reuters analysis found that tax breaks on church giving shaved $12 billion or so from total U.S. tax collections in 2011 and approximately $145 billion over the last decade.

The property tax break is probably even bigger. In their 2011 book "Politics, Taxes, and the Pulpit," law professors Nina Crimm and Laurence Winer calculated that houses of worship received $12.7 billion in property tax exemptions on $685 billion of property in 2006, a figure large enough to have played a role in city and state budget deficits of recent years.

In big cities the numbers can be dramatic. New York City's 9,500 churches, synagogues, and mosques, for example, will avoid $626.9 million in property taxes this year thanks to their tax-free status, according to the city's Independent Budget Office.

Like most of California, La Mesa, where Garlow's Skyline Church is located, has suffered a steep drop in property tax collections, forcing municipal staff cuts and a sales tax increase.

Skyline's campus, which is assessed at $7.3 million and cost a reported $27 million to build, is almost entirely tax-exempt, according to the county assessor's office.

The IRS has not always been quiet. In 1992 it went after the Church at Pierce Creek in Binghamton, New York, which had bought full-page newspaper ads opposing then-Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton.

The church lost its IRS tax-exempt status but continued operating, changing its name to Landmark Church when it moved into central Binghamton several years ago.

Pastor Dan Little said the church never lost its property tax break. At the end of the year, Landmark gives people a record of their giving just like other churches, he said, leaving it up to them and their accountants to decide tax matters. "We just never have made any big issue of it," said Little, who continues to preach about politics and morals.

In 2004 the IRS created a dedicated enforcement program focused on political activity by churches and other nonprofits.

Called the Political Activities Compliance Initiative (PACI), it investigated in the 2004, 2006 and 2008 election cycles 80 instances where church officials were alleged to have endorsed a candidate during services.

According to IRS tallies made public after each election, the majority of the PACI complaints were upheld and settled with a warning that the organization comply with the ban on political activity.

The IRS did not respond to Reuters questions about its enforcement activities in recent years, or explain why they seem to have ended abruptly in 2009.

IRS church audits seem to have halted entirely in January 2009. That was when Living Word Christian Center in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, successfully appealed an IRS audit. In question were an endorsement of Republican Michele Bachmann for Congress by pastor James Hammond and financial deals that may have benefited him personally, a violation of IRS rules.

IRS audits of churches must comply with strict rules designed to prevent undue governmental pressure. One is that a high-level IRS or Treasury Department official must authorize the audit. In the Living Word case, the U.S. District Court in Minnesota ruled that the IRS staffer who authorized the audit did not qualify.

In July of that year, Minnesota's Warroad Community Church was told by an IRS official that it was closing its 2008 examination of the church "because of a pending issue regarding the procedure used to initiate the inquiry." (Reuters obtained a copy of the letter from the Alliance Defense Fund, which was representing Warroad in the audit.)

Other churches that had been under IRS review received comparable letters, according to their lawyers.

The IRS stopped publishing the results of its PACI initiative. Three years later the IRS has yet to come up with a new set of church audit rules, making it impossible, experts say, for the agency to pursue such examinations.

Former staff insist that being seen as weak on enforcement of the law would be more damaging to the IRS than any allegation of partisanship would be.

Still, tight budget may have made it easy to put off tackling 501(c)(3) disputes. Others argued the agency may worry it could lose a court case over revocation on constitutional grounds, and that by avoiding such a test they may preserve the deterrent power of having the law on the books.

Whatever the reason, IRS inaction has effectively thwarted the evangelicals' efforts to force the matter in court.

At the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting last week in Atlanta, bishops vowed to keep up their criticism of Obama administration policies on employer-provided birth control and other controversies.

"The first principle is that American citizens don't lose their freedom of religion or their freedom of expression when they become bishops," said Cardinal Francis George of Chicago.

As to what is and is not acceptable to say about candidates for office, "the guidelines are broader than some may interpret them," George told Reuters at the conference. In follow-up email correspondence, he declined to say whether he thought the IRS rules constrained free speech or whether he would be willing to forgo the church's tax exemption so clerics could speak out without restriction.

The meeting offered no public discussion of an April sermon by Illinois Bishop Daniel Jenky that has been vigorously debated in the local and the religious press and which many think violated the prohibition against opposing a candidate for office. The sermon has drawn a request for an IRS investigation by a watchdog group.

After asserting that Obama, "with his radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda" seemed to be on an anti-Catholic path similar to Hitler and Stalin, Jenky exhorted all Catholics to "vote their Catholic consciences" this fall.

Do the people in congregations follow such instructions? Only 18 percent of those polled by the Pew Research Center in January said the endorsement of a candidate by their minister, priest or rabbi would sway their vote. Seventy percent said it would make no difference.

A second Pew study this spring found that most parishioners would prefer their religious leaders steer clear of electioneering, with Catholics among the most adamant.

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