Last Friday, House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R‑CA) and colleagues sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman accusing Treasury of “either willfully misleading the Committee or…purposefully withholding information that is essential to the Committee’s oversight effort.”

As Jonathan Adler and I document in our forthcoming Health Matrix article, “Taxation Without Representation: The Illegal IRS Rule to Expand Tax Credits Under the PPACA,” the IRS has announced it will impose ObamaCare’s taxes on employers and individuals whom Congress expressly exempted from those taxes, and will send potentially hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to private health insurance companies, also contrary to the plain language of the statute. Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt has filed a legal challenge to the IRS rule that imposes those illegal taxes.

On August 20, the committee sent IRS commissioner Shulman a letter requesting “all legal analysis, internal or external, conducted by the IRS which authorizes IRS to grant premium-assistance tax credits in federal Exchanges,” and “all documents and communications between IRS employees and employees of the White House Executive Office of the President or any other federal agency or department referring or relating to the proposed IRS rule or final IRS rule.”

When Treasury responded for the IRS on October 12, according to committee member Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R‑TN), it “failed to include a single document, memorandum, communication, or email created before the publication of the proposed rule on August 17, 2011”—i.e., when all the interesting discussions would have occurred. The committee’s second letter complains, “Treasury did not provide a single piece of evidence to support its claim that IRS complied with the standard process when issuing this rule.”

Thus, the committee threatened, “If you do not provide all of the requested information by Thursday, October 25, 2012, the Committee will consider the use of compulsory process.” Developing…

For more on this issue, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.