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130-514: COINTELPRO (a syllabic abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive . Groups and individuals targeted by

260-499: A 2024 study, "an additional $ 1 spent auditing taxpayers above the 90th income percentile yields more than $ 12 in revenue, while audits of below-median income taxpayers yield $ 5." As of 2018, it saw a 15 percent reduction in its workforce , including a decline of more than 25 percent of its enforcement staff. Nevertheless, during the 2023 fiscal year, the agency processed more than 271.4 million tax returns including more than 163.1 million individual income tax returns. For FY 2023,

390-961: A Senate report, the FBI's motivation was "protecting national security , preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order". Beginning in 1969, leaders of the Black Panther Party were targeted by the COINTELPRO and "neutralized" by being assassinated, imprisoned, publicly humiliated or falsely charged with crimes. Some of the Black Panthers targeted include Fred Hampton , Mark Clark , Zayd Shakur , Geronimo Pratt , Mumia Abu-Jamal , and Marshall Conway . Common tactics used by COINTELPRO were perjury, witness harassment, witness intimidation, and withholding of exculpatory evidence. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued directives governing COINTELPRO, ordering FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize"

520-578: A courtroom via criminal prosecutions to curtail the activities of some of these groups, IRS can do by administrative action." By 1986, limited electronic filing of tax returns was possible. The Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 ("RRA 98") changed the organization from geographically oriented to an organization based on four operating divisions. It added "10 deadly sins" that require immediate termination of IRS employees found to have committed certain misconduct. Enforcement activities declined. The IRS Oversight Board noted that

650-511: A decision that contradicted Hylton v. United States . The federal government scrambled to raise money. In 1906, with the election of President Theodore Roosevelt , and later his successor William Howard Taft , the United States saw a populist movement for tax reform. This movement culminated during then-candidate Woodrow Wilson 's election of 1912 and in February 1913, the ratification of

780-458: A decline in the number of paper returns being processed each year. As a result, the IRS implemented a consolidation plan for its paper tax return processing centers, closing five of its ten processing centers between 2003 and 2011. The agency closed two more centers - one in 2019 and another in 2021 - as e-file use continued to expand. E-filed tax returns accounted for 90% of all returns submitted during

910-513: A federal trial for Liuzzo's murder in December 1965. FBI informant Rowe has also been implicated in some of the most violent crimes of the 1960s civil rights era, including attacks on the Freedom Riders and the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama 16th Street Baptist Church bombing . The ACLU has claimed the FBI supported an extreme right-wing group of former Minutemen , transforming it into a group called

1040-411: A few examples, there is Aldi , from Theo Albrecht , the name of its founder, followed by discount ; Haribo , from Hans Riegel , the name of its founder, followed by Bonn , the town of its head office; and Adidas , from Adolf "Adi" Dassler , the nickname of its founder followed by his surname. Internal Revenue Service The Internal Revenue Service ( IRS ) is the revenue service for

1170-455: A government agency." Requard admitted that he saw the returns but denied that he leaked them. Reporter Jack White of The Providence Journal won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting about Nixon's tax returns. Nixon, with a salary of $ 200,000, paid $ 792.81 in federal income tax in 1970 and $ 878.03 in 1971, with deductions of $ 571,000 for donating "vice-presidential papers". This was one of

1300-475: A hit on Fort. They also were instrumental in developing the rift between Black Panther Party leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, as executed through false letters inciting the two leaders of the Black Panther Party. Dhoruba Bin Wahad , a former Black Panther, reflects on how these tactics made him feel, saying he had a combat mentality and felt like he was at war with the government. When asked about why he thinks

1430-461: A media campaign offering the surveillance transcript to various news organizations, including Newsweek and Newsday . Even by 1969, as has been noted elsewhere, "[FBI] efforts to 'expose' Martin Luther King Jr. had not slackened even though King had been dead for a year. [The Bureau] furnished ammunition to opponents that enabled attacks on King's memory, and ... tried to block efforts to honor

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1560-484: A messy tax season on several fronts. The email was sent by IRS Commissioner Koskinen to workers. Koskinen predicted the IRS would shut down operations for two days later that year which would result in unpaid furloughs for employees and service cuts for taxpayers . Koskinen also said delays to IT investments of more than $ 200   million may delay new taxpayer protections against identity theft . Also in January 2015,

1690-412: A much more militant vision of " black power ". While the FBI was particularly concerned with leaders and organizers, they did not limit their scope of target to the heads of organizations. Individuals such as writers were also listed among the targets of operations. This program coincided with a broader federal effort to prepare military responses for urban riots and began increased collaboration between

1820-409: A new login and ID verification process for several of its online tools, including general account access, Identity Protection (IP) PIN setup, and payment plan applications. As part of the agency's Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) initiative, the process included the use of third-party facial recognition technologies to confirm taxpayer identities. The facial recognition requirement

1950-475: A person's name, such as Migjeni —an abbreviation from his original name ( Millosh Gjergj Nikolla ) a famous Albanian poet and writer—or ASDRENI ( Aleksander Stavre Drenova ), another famous Albanian poet. Other such names which are used commonly in recent decades are GETOAR, composed from Gegeria + Tosks (representing the two main dialects of the Albanian language, Gegë and Toskë), and Arbanon —which

2080-555: A plural of an initialization without an apostrophe can also be used for a number, or a letter. Examples: For units of measure, the same form is used for both singular and plural. Examples: When an abbreviation contains more than one period, Hart's Rules recommends putting the s after the final one. Examples: However, the same plurals may be rendered less formally as: According to Hart's Rules , an apostrophe may be used in rare cases where clarity calls for it, for example when letters or symbols are referred to as objects. However,

2210-465: A report critical of the lack of protection of privacy in TAS, and the project was abandoned in 1978. In 1995, the IRS began to use the public Internet for electronic filing. Since the introduction of e-filing , self-paced online tax services have flourished, augmenting the work of tax accountants, who were sometimes replaced. By 2002, more than a third of all tax returns were filed electronically. This led to

2340-791: A result, the IRS now functions under four major operating divisions: The Large Business & International (LB&I) division was known as the Large and Mid-Size Business division prior to a name change on October 1, 2010. The IRS is headquartered in Washington, D.C. , and does most of its computer programming in Maryland. It processes paper tax returns sent by mail and e-filed tax returns at three IRS center locations: Austin, Texas; Kansas City, Missouri; and Ogden, Utah. The IRS also operates computer centers in three locations: Detroit, Michigan; Martinsburg, West Virginia; and Memphis, Tennessee. The IRS

2470-471: A sequence of words without other punctuation. For example, FBI ( /ˌɛf.biːˈaɪ/ ), USA ( /ˌjuː.ɛsˈeɪ/ ), IBM ( /ˌaɪ.biːˈɛm/ ), BBC ( /ˌbiː.biːˈsiː/ ). When initialism is used as the preferred term, acronym refers more specifically to when the abbreviation is pronounced as a word rather than as separate letters; examples include SWAT and NASA . Initialisms, contractions and crasis share some semantic and phonetic functions, and are connected by

2600-554: A single letter and was originally spelled with lower case letters then there is no need for capitalization. However, when abbreviating a phrase where only the first letter of each word is taken, then all letters should be capitalized, as in YTD for year-to-date , PCB for printed circuit board and FYI for for your information . However, see the following section regarding abbreviations that have become common vocabulary: these are no longer written with capital letters. A period (a.k.a. full stop)

2730-448: A sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence. The Church Committee documented a history of the FBI (initially called BOI until 1936) exercising political repression as far back as World War I, and through

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2860-508: A symbol such as "km" for " kilometre ". In the International System of Units (SI) manual the word "symbol" is used consistently to define the shorthand used to represent the various SI units of measure. The manual also defines the way in which units should be written , the principal rules being: A syllabic abbreviation is usually formed from the initial syllables of several words, such as Interpol = International + police . It

2990-550: A tax on income and leading to the creation of the Bureau of Internal Revenue . In 1953, the agency was renamed the Internal Revenue Service, and in subsequent decades underwent numerous reforms and reorganizations, most significantly in the 1990s. Since its establishment, the IRS has been largely responsible for collecting the revenue needed to fund the United States federal government, with the rest being funded either through

3120-559: Is a syllabic abbreviation of Commonwealth and (Thomas) Edison . Sections of California are also often colloquially syllabically abbreviated, as in NorCal (Northern California), CenCal (Central California), and SoCal (Southern California). Additionally, in the context of Los Angeles, the syllabic abbreviation SoHo (Southern Hollywood) refers to the southern portion of the Hollywood neighborhood. Partially syllabic abbreviations are preferred by

3250-528: Is a variant of the acronym. Syllabic abbreviations are usually written using lower case , sometimes starting with a capital letter , and are always pronounced as words rather than letter by letter. Syllabic abbreviations should be distinguished from portmanteaus , which combine two words without necessarily taking whole syllables from each. Syllabic abbreviations are not widely used in English. Some UK government agencies such as Ofcom (Office of Communications) and

3380-755: Is an alternative way used to describe all Albanian lands. Syllabic abbreviations were and are common in German ; much like acronyms in English, they have a distinctly modern connotation, although contrary to popular belief, many date back to before 1933 , if not the end of the Great War . Kriminalpolizei , literally criminal police but idiomatically the Criminal Investigation Department of any German police force, begat KriPo (variously capitalised), and likewise Schutzpolizei ( protection police or uniform department ) begat SchuPo . Along

3510-470: Is blamed for $ 4   billion worth of fraudulent 2012 tax refunds by the IRS. Fraudulent claims were made with the use of stolen taxpayer identification and Social Security numbers, with returns sent to addresses both in the US and internationally. Following the release of the findings, the IRS stated that it resolved most of the identity theft cases of 2013 within 120 days, while the average time to resolve cases from

3640-418: Is controversy as to which should be used. One generally accepted rule is to be consistent in a body of work. To this end, publishers may express their preferences in a style guide . Some controversies that arise are described below. If the original word was capitalized then the first letter of its abbreviation should retain the capital, for example Lev. for Leviticus . When a word is abbreviated to more than

3770-447: Is currently led by Daniel Werfel , who became Commissioner of Internal Revenue on March 13, 2023. He succeeded Douglas O'Donnell , who served as Acting Commissioner of Internal Revenue after Charles P. Rettig 's term as Commissioner ended on November 12, 2022. There have been 50 commissioners of Internal Revenue and 28 acting commissioners since the agency's creation in 1862. From May 22, 2013, to December 23, 2013, senior official at

3900-403: Is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation". King believed that he was subsequently informed that the audio would be released to the media if he did not acquiesce and commit suicide prior to accepting his Nobel Peace Prize. When King refused to satisfy their coercion tactics, FBI Associate Director, Cartha D. DeLoach, commenced

4030-695: Is sometimes used to signify abbreviation, but opinion is divided as to when and if this convention is best practice. According to Hart's Rules , a word shortened by dropping letters from the end terminates with a period, whereas a word shorted by dropping letters from the middle does not. Fowler's Modern English Usage says a period is used for both of these shortened forms, but recommends against this practice: advising it only for end-shortened words and lower-case initialisms; not for middle-shortened words and upper-case initialisms. Some British style guides, such as for The Guardian and The Economist , disallow periods for all abbreviations. In American English ,

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4160-506: Is to disrupt the Black Panther Party and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge." Viola's family endured Hoover's claiming that cuts on her arm from the car's shattered window indicated "recent drug use" and that her proximity to Moton resembled "a necking party," despite an autopsy revealing no traces of drugs in her system and indicating she hadn't had sex recently before her death. In one particularly controversial 1965 incident, white civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo

4290-584: Is typically US . There are multiple ways to pluralize an abbreviation. Sometimes this accomplished by adding an apostrophe and an s ( 's ), as in "two PC's have broken screens". But, some find this confusing since the notation can indicate possessive case . And, this style is deprecated by many style guides. For instance, Kate Turabian , writing about style in academic writings, allows for an apostrophe to form plural acronyms "only when an abbreviation contains internal periods or both capital and lowercase letters". For example, "DVDs" and "URLs" and "Ph.D.'s", while

4420-408: Is usually abbreviated etc. and abbreviation is sometimes abbreviated abbr. , abbrv. , or abbrev. . But sometimes the trailing period is not used for such shortened forms. A contraction is an abbreviation formed by replacing letters with an apostrophe. Examples include I'm for I am and li'l for little . An initialism or acronym is an abbreviation consisting of the initial letter of

4550-708: The Affordable Care Act . The IRS originates from the Commissioner of Internal Revenue , a federal office created in 1862 to assess the nation's first income tax to fund the American Civil War . The temporary measure funded over a fifth of the Union's war expenses before being allowed to expire a decade later. In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, authorizing Congress to impose

4680-551: The Modern Language Association explicitly says, "do not use an apostrophe to form the plural of an abbreviation". Also, the American Psychological Association specifically says, "without an apostrophe". However, the 1999 style guide for The New York Times states that the addition of an apostrophe is necessary when pluralizing all abbreviations, preferring "PC's, TV's and VCR's". Forming

4810-605: The Office of Management and Budget Daniel Werfel was acting Commissioner of Internal Revenue. Werfel, who attended law school at the University of North Carolina and attained a master's degree from Duke University , prepared the government for a potential shutdown in 2011 by determining which services that would remain in existence. No IRS commissioner has served more than five years and one month since Guy Helvering, who served 10 years until 1943. The most recent commissioner to serve

4940-679: The Old English poem Beowulf used many abbreviations, for example the Tironian et ( ⁊ ) or & for and , and y for since , so that "not much space is wasted". The standardisation of English in the 15th through 17th centuries included a growth in the use of such abbreviations. At first, abbreviations were sometimes represented with various suspension signs, not only periods. For example, sequences like ⟨er⟩ were replaced with ⟨ɔ⟩ , as in mastɔ for master and exacɔbate for exacerbate . While this may seem trivial, it

5070-698: The Secret Army Organization that targeted groups, activists, and leaders involved in the Anti-War Movement, using both intimidation and violent acts. Hoover ordered preemptive action "to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence." The final report of the Church Committee concluded: Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been illegally collected. The Government has often undertaken

5200-496: The Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution : The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration. This granted Congress the specific power to impose an income tax without regard to apportionment among the states by population. By February 1913, 36 states had ratified

5330-775: The Socialist Workers Party from their pledge of support for the antiwar movement. The FBI has said that it no longer undertakes COINTELPRO or COINTELPRO-like operations. However, critics have claimed that agency programs in the spirit of COINTELPRO targeted groups such as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador , the American Indian Movement , Earth First! , and the anti-globalization movement . According to attorney Brian Glick in his book War at Home ,

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5460-751: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) , the Deacons for Defense and Justice , Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Nation of Islam . BLACK HATE established the Ghetto Informant Program and instructed 23 FBI offices to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate type organizations". A March 1968 memo stated

5590-484: The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (collecting duties and tariffs ) or the Federal Reserve (purchasing U.S. treasuries ). The IRS faces periodic controversy and opposition over its methods, constitutionality, and the principle of taxation generally. In recent years, the agency has struggled with budget cuts, under-staffed workforce, outdated technology and reduced morale, all of which collectively result in

5720-796: The United Farm Workers , and independence movements (including Puerto Rican independence groups such as the Young Lords and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party ). Although the program primarily focused on organizations that were part of the broader New Left , they also targeted white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National States' Rights Party . The FBI has used covert operations against domestic political groups since its inception; however, covert operations under

5850-837: The United States federal government , which is responsible for collecting U.S. federal taxes and administering the Internal Revenue Code , the main body of the federal statutory tax law. It is an agency of the Department of the Treasury and led by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue , who is appointed to a five-year term by the President of the United States. The duties of the IRS include providing tax assistance to taxpayers; pursuing and resolving instances of erroneous or fraudulent tax filings; and overseeing various benefits programs, including

5980-471: The 1920s, when agents were charged with rounding up "anarchists, communists, socialists, reformists and revolutionaries" for deportation. From 1936 through 1976, the domestic operations were increased against political and anti-war groups. The FBI claimed that the purpose behind COINTELPRO was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize" groups that the FBI officials believed were "subversive" by instructing FBI field operatives to: At its inception,

6110-456: The 1990s led to a marked rise in colloquial abbreviation. This was due largely to increasing popularity of textual communication services such as instant and text messaging. The original SMS supported message lengths of 160 characters at most (using the GSM 03.38 character set), for instance. This brevity gave rise to an informal abbreviation scheme sometimes called Textese , with which 10% or more of

6240-456: The 2011/2012 tax period was 312 days. In September 2014, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen expressed concern over the organization's ability to handle Obamacare and administer premium tax credits that help people pay for health plans from the health law's insurance exchanges. It will also enforce the law's individual mandate , which requires most Americans to hold health insurance. In January 2015, Fox News obtained an email which predicted

6370-455: The 2021 filing season. In 2003, the IRS struck a deal with tax software vendors: The IRS would not develop online filing software and, in return, software vendors would provide free e-filing to most Americans. In 2009, 70% of filers qualified for free electronic filing of federal returns. According to an inspector general's report, released in November 2013, identity theft in the United States

6500-652: The 20th century. The contractions in Newspeak are supposed to have a political function by virtue of their abbreviated structure itself: nice sounding and easily pronounceable, their purpose is to mask all ideological content from the speaker. A more recent syllabic abbreviation has emerged with the disease COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease 2019) caused by the Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (itself frequently abbreviated to SARS-CoV-2 , partly an initialism). In Albanian, syllabic acronyms are sometimes used for composing

6630-633: The Black Panther Party had concluded that in his city, at least, the Panthers were primarily engaged in feeding breakfast to children. Hoover fired back a memo implying the agent's career goals would be directly affected by his supplying evidence to support Hoover's view that the Black Panther Party was "a violence-prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means". Hoover supported using false claims to attack his political enemies. In one memo he wrote: "Purpose of counterintelligence action

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6760-506: The Black Panthers were targeted he said, "In the United States, the equivalent of the military was the local police. During the early sixties, at the height of the civil rights movement, and the human rights movement, the police in the United States became increasingly militaristic. They began to train out of military bases in the United States. The Law Enforcement Assistance Act supplied local police with military technology, everything from assault rifles to army personnel carriers. In his opinion,

6890-508: The Committee finds that the most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials, who were responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to assure compliance with the law. Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that ... the Bureau conducted

7020-620: The Counterintelligence Program went hand-in-hand with the militarization of the police in the Black community, with the militarization of police in America." The FBI also conspired with the police departments of many U.S. cities (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Philadelphia, Chicago) to encourage repeated raids on Black Panther homes—often with little or no evidence of violations of federal, state, or local laws—which resulted in

7150-550: The FBI ensured that groups would not unite in their causes. For instance, they launched a campaign specifically to alienate the Black Panther Party from the Mau Maus, Young Lords, Young Patriots and SDS. These racially diverse groups had been building alliances, in part due to charismatic leaders such as Fred Hampton and his attempts to create a "Rainbow Coalition". The FBI was concerned with ensuring that groups could not gain traction through unity, specifically across racial lines. One of

7280-584: The FBI included feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA , anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists in the civil rights and Black power movements (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr. , the Nation of Islam , and the Black Panther Party ), environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Chicano and Mexican-American groups like the Brown Berets and

7410-427: The FBI on November 21, 1964, that contained audio recordings obtained through tapping King's phone and placing bugs throughout various hotel rooms over the past two years, and that was created two days after the announcement of King's impending Nobel Peace Prize . The tape, which was prepared by FBI audio technician John Matter, documented a series of sexual indiscretions by King combined with a letter telling him: "There

7540-600: The FBI used five main methods during COINTELPRO: The FBI specifically developed tactics intended to heighten tension and hostility between various factions in the black power movement, for example between the Black Panthers and the US Organization . For instance, the FBI sent a fake letter to the US Organization exposing a supposed Black Panther plot to murder the head of the US Organization, Ron Karenga . They then intensified this by spreading falsely attributed cartoons in

7670-492: The FBI's ongoing surveillance of black leaders, including it within COINTELPRO, with the justification that the movement was infiltrated by communists . In 1956, Hoover sent an open letter denouncing Dr.  T. R. M. Howard , a civil rights leader, surgeon, and wealthy entrepreneur in Mississippi who had criticized FBI inaction in solving recent murders of George W. Lee , Emmett Till , and other African Americans in

7800-485: The FBI's overall workload during a 15-year timeframe), COINTELPRO was subsequently subject to criticism from both Congress and the American public for infringing upon first amendment rights and other grounds. Tactics included anonymous phone calls, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audits, and the creation of documents that would divide the American communist organization internally. An October 1956 memo from Hoover reclassified

7930-549: The FBI, Central Intelligence Agency , National Security Agency , and the Department of Defense . The CIA launched its own domestic espionage project in 1967 called Operation CHAOS . A particular target was the Poor People's Campaign , a national effort organized by King and the SCLC to occupy Washington, DC. The FBI monitored and disrupted the campaign on a national level, while using targeted smear tactics locally to undermine support for

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8060-466: The IRS collected approximately $ 4.7 trillion, which is approximately 96 percent of the operational funding for the federal government; funding widely throughout to different aspects of American society , from education and healthcare to national defense and infrastructure. In July 1862, during the American Civil War , President Abraham Lincoln and Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1862 , creating

8190-479: The IRS was tasked with enforcement of laws relating to prohibition of alcohol sales and manufacture ; this was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice in 1930. After repeal in 1933, the IRS resumed collection of taxes on beverage alcohol. The alcohol, tobacco and firearms activities of the bureau were segregated into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 1972. A new tax act

8320-832: The New Left") to the New Mexico Free University and other "alternate" schools, and from underground newspapers to students' protesting university censorship of a student publication by carrying signs with four-letter words on them. Examples of surveillance, spanning all presidents from FDR to Nixon, both legal and illegal, contained in the Church Committee report: Groups that were known to be targets of COINTELPRO operations include: The COINTELPRO operators targeted multiple groups at once and encouraged splintering of these groups from within. In letter-writing campaigns (wherein false letters were sent on behalf of members of parties),

8450-645: The SWP or the Young Socialist Alliance, its youth group. The Black Nationalist program targeted a range of organizations from the Panthers to SNCC to the peaceful Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and included every Black Student Union and many other black student groups. New Left targets ranged from the SDS to the InterUniversity Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy, from Antioch College ("vanguard of

8580-543: The Senate's Church Committee (see below) stated that "COINTELPRO began in 1956, in part because of frustration with Supreme Court rulings limiting the Government's power to proceed overtly against dissident groups." Official congressional committees and several court cases have concluded that COINTELPRO operations against communist and socialist groups exceeded statutory limits on FBI activity and violated constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association . The program

8710-620: The South. When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an African-American civil rights organization, was founded in 1957, the FBI began to monitor and target the group almost immediately, focusing particularly on Bayard Rustin , Stanley Levison , and eventually Martin Luther King Jr. After the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom , Hoover singled out King as a major target for COINTELPRO. Under pressure from Hoover to focus on King, Sullivan wrote: In

8840-763: The US Navy, as they increase readability amidst the large number of initialisms that would otherwise have to fit into the same acronyms. Hence DESRON 6 is used (in the full capital form) to mean "Destroyer Squadron 6", while COMNAVAIRLANT would be "Commander, Naval Air Force (in the) Atlantic". Syllabic abbreviations are a prominent feature of Newspeak , the fictional language of George Orwell 's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four . The political contractions of Newspeak— Ingsoc (English Socialism), Minitrue (Ministry of Truth), Miniplenty ( Ministry of Plenty )—are described by Orwell as similar to real examples of German ( see below ) and Russian ( see below ) contractions in

8970-470: The Union raised 21% of its war revenue through income taxes. After the Civil War, Reconstruction , railroads, and transforming the North and South war machines towards peacetime required public funding. However, in 1872, seven years after the war, lawmakers allowed the temporary Civil War income tax to expire. Income taxes evolved, but in 1894 the Supreme Court declared the Income Tax of 1894 unconstitutional in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. ,

9100-449: The United States Senate, commonly referred to as the " Church Committee " after its chairman, Senator Frank Church (D- Idaho ), launched a major investigation of the FBI and COINTELPRO. Many released documents have been partly or entirely redacted . The Final Report of the Select Committee castigated the conduct of the intelligence community in its domestic operations (including COINTELPRO) in no uncertain terms: The Committee finds that

9230-581: The activities of these movements and especially their leaders. Under Hoover, the official in charge of COINTELPRO was assistant director William C. Sullivan . Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy personally authorized some of the programs, giving written approval for limited wiretapping of Martin Luther King's phones "on a trial basis, for a month or so". Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of King's life they deemed worthy. The FBI initiated COINTELPRO, an abbreviation for Counterintelligence Program, in 1956 with

9360-628: The actual targets were chosen from a far broader group than the titles of the programs would imply. The CPUSA program targeted not only Communist Party members but also sponsors of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee and civil rights leaders allegedly under Communist influence or deemed to be not sufficiently "anti-Communist". The Socialist Workers Party program included non-SWP sponsors of anti-war demonstrations which were cosponsored by

9490-588: The aim of undermining the operations of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, the scope of the organization was broadened to encompass various additional domestic factions, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. The cessation of all COINTELPRO operations occurred in 1971. Despite its relatively small scale (constituting approximately 0.2% of

9620-455: The apostrophe can be dispensed with if the items are set in italics or quotes: In Latin, and continuing to the derivative forms in European languages as well as English, single-letter abbreviations had the plural being a doubling of the letter for note-taking. Most of these deal with writing and publishing. A few longer abbreviations use this as well. Publications based in the U.S. tend to follow

9750-464: The black communities pitting the Black Panther Party against the US Organization. This resulted in numerous deaths, among which were San Diego Black Panther Party members John Huggins, Bunchy Carter and Sylvester Bell. Another example of the FBI's anonymous letter writing campaign is how they turned the Blackstone Rangers head, Jeff Fort, against former ally Fred Hampton, by stating that Hampton had

9880-554: The burglary. Muhammad Ali was a COINTELPRO target because he had joined the Nation of Islam and the anti-war movement. Many news organizations initially refused to immediately publish the information, with the notable exception of The Washington Post . After affirming the reliability of the documents, it published them on the front page (in defiance of the Attorney General's request), prompting other organizations to follow suit. Within

10010-465: The change to the Constitution. It was further ratified by six more states by March. Of the 48 states at the time, 42 ratified it. Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Utah rejected the amendment; Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida did not take up the issue. Though the constitutional amendment to allow the federal government to collect income taxes was proposed by President Taft in 1909, the 16th Amendment

10140-508: The civil rights movement. In the mid-1960s, King began to publicly criticize the Bureau for giving insufficient attention to the use of terrorism by white supremacists. Hoover responded by publicly calling King the most "notorious liar" in the United States. In his 1991 memoir, Washington Post journalist Carl Rowan asserted that the FBI had sent at least one anonymous letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide. Historian Taylor Branch documents an anonymous " suicide package " sent by

10270-585: The court, an FBI agent testified that he believed Pratt had been framed, because both the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department knew he had not been in the area at the time the murder occurred. Some sources claim that the FBI conducted more than 200 " black bag jobs ", which were warrantless surreptitious entries, against the targeted groups and their members. In 1969 the FBI special agent in San Francisco wrote Hoover that his investigation of

10400-562: The decline in enforcement activities has "rais[ed] questions about tax compliance and fairness to the vast majority of citizens who pay all their taxes". In June 2012, the IRS Oversight Board recommended to Treasury a fiscal year 2014 budget of $ 13.074   billion for the Internal Revenue Service. On December 20, 2017, Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 . It was signed into law by President Trump on December 22, 2017. In

10530-531: The domestic activities of the intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens. The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the programs served the "national security" the law did not apply. While intelligence officers on occasion failed to disclose to their superiors programs which were illegal or of questionable legality,

10660-409: The editorial board of The New York Times called the IRS budget cuts penny-wise-and-pound-foolish, where for every dollar of cuts in the budget, six were lost in tax revenue. A 2020 Treasury Department audit found the IRS had improved its identity verification system offerings for taxpayers, but was still behind in fully meeting digital identity requirements. The following year, the IRS announced

10790-664: The filing deadline was moved from March 15 to April 15. The Tax Reform Act of 1969 created the Alternative Minimum Tax . In 1969, Richard Nixon directed the IRS to audit his political opponents, as well as opponents of US involvement in the Vietnam War . The IRS's Activist Organizations Committee, later renamed the Special Services Staff, created a target list of more than 1,000 organizations and 4,000 individuals. A White House memo said that "What we cannot do in

10920-401: The final months of his life. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Malcolm X by Manning Marable asserts that most of the men who plotted Malcolm's assassination were never apprehended and that the full extent of the FBI's involvement in his death cannot be known. Amidst the urban unrest of July–August 1967, the FBI began "COINTELPRO–BLACK HATE", which focused on King and the SCLC, as well as

11050-428: The form and the IRS checked the form for accuracy. The IRS's workload jumped by ten-fold, triggering a massive restructuring. Professional tax collectors began to replace a system of "patronage" appointments. The IRS doubled its staff but was still processing 1917 returns in 1919. Income tax raised much of the money required to finance the war effort; in 1918 a new Revenue Act established a top tax rate of 77%. In 1919

11180-472: The formal programs were instituted, and more significantly, COINTELPRO-type activities may continue today under the rubric of 'investigation." Many of the tactics used in COINTELPRO are alleged to have seen continued use, including discrediting targets through psychological warfare ; smearing individuals and groups using forged documents and by planting false reports in the media; harassment; wrongful imprisonment; illegal violence; and assassination . According to

11310-428: The former Oftel (Office of Telecommunications) use this style. New York City has various neighborhoods named by syllabic abbreviation, such as Tribeca (Triangle below Canal Street) and SoHo (South of Houston Street). This usage has spread into other American cities, giving SoMa , San Francisco (South of Market) and LoDo, Denver (Lower Downtown), amongst others. Chicago -based electric service provider ComEd

11440-451: The globally popular term OK generally credited as a remnant of its influence. Over the years, however, the lack of convention in some style guides has made it difficult to determine which two-word abbreviations should be abbreviated with periods and which should not. This question is considered below. Widespread use of electronic communication through mobile phones and the Internet during

11570-401: The inappropriate enforcement of tax laws against high earners and large corporations , reduced tax collection, rising deficits , lower spending on important priorities, or further tax increases on compliant taxpayers to compensate for lost revenue . Research shows that IRS audits raise revenue, both through the initial audit and indirectly by deterring future tax cheating. According to

11700-449: The light of King's powerful demagogic speech ... We must mark him now if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security. Soon after, the FBI was systematically bugging King's home and his hotel rooms, as they were now aware that King was growing in stature daily as the most prominent leader of

11830-634: The longest term was Doug Shulman, who was appointed by President George W. Bush and served for five years. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue is assisted by two deputy commissioners. The Deputy Commissioner for Operations Support reports directly to the Commissioner and oversees the IRS's integrated support functions, working to facilitate economy of scale efficiencies and better business practices. The Deputy also administers and provides executive leadership for customer service, processing, tax law enforcement and financial management operations. Additionally,

11960-637: The main ways of targeting these groups was to arouse suspicion between the different parties and causes. In this way the bureau took on a divide-and-conquer offensive. The COINTELPRO documents show numerous cases of the FBI's intentions to prevent and disrupt protests against the Vietnam War . Many techniques were used to accomplish this task. "These included promoting splits among antiwar forces, encouraging red-baiting of socialists, and pushing violent confrontations as an alternative to massive, peaceful demonstrations." One 1966 COINTELPRO operation tried to redirect

12090-467: The march. The Black Panther Party was another targeted organization, wherein the FBI collaborated to destroy the party from the inside out. Overall, COINTELPRO encompassed disruption and sabotage of the Socialist Workers Party (1961), the Ku Klux Klan (1964), the Nation of Islam , the Black Panther Party (1967), and the entire New Left social/political movement, which included antiwar, community, and religious groups (1968). A later investigation by

12220-418: The office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue and enacting a temporary income tax to pay war expenses. The Revenue Act of 1862 was passed as an emergency and temporary war-time tax. It copied a relatively new British system of income taxation, instead of trade and property taxation. The first income tax was passed in 1862: By the end of the war, 10% of Union households had paid some form of income tax, and

12350-400: The official COINTELPRO label took place between 1956 and 1971. However, the official chronology of the program is the subject of the debate. According to a senate investigation, "If COINTELPRO had been a short-lived aberration, the thorny problems of motivation, techniques, and control presented might be safely relegated to history. However, COINTELPRO existed for years on an 'ad hoc basis before

12480-487: The period is usually included regardless of whether or not it is a contraction, e.g. Dr. or Mrs. . In some cases, periods are optional, as in either US or U.S. for United States , EU or E.U. for European Union , and UN or U.N. for United Nations . There are some house styles, however—American ones included—that remove the periods from almost all abbreviations. For example: Acronyms that were originally capitalized (with or without periods) but have since entered

12610-437: The personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens . Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous—and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations—have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Syllabic abbreviation An abbreviation may be a shortened form of a word with a trailing period. For example: etcetera

12740-426: The police killing many members of the Black Panther Party, most notably Chicago Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969. Whether or not the FBI sanctioned his killing remains unproven. Before the death of Hampton, long-term infiltrator, William O'Neal, shared floor plans of his apartment with the COINTELPRO team. He then gave Hampton a dose of secobarbital that rendered Hampton unconscious during

12870-498: The program's goal was to "prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups"; to "Prevent the RISE OF A ' MESSIAH ' who could unify ... the militant black nationalist movement"; "to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence [against authorities]"; to "Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to ... both

13000-469: The program's main target was the Communist Party. In an interview with the BBC 's Andrew Marr in February 1996, Noam Chomsky —a political activist and MIT professor of linguistics —spoke about the purpose and the targets of COINTELPRO, saying: COINTELPRO was a program of subversion carried out not by a couple of petty crooks but by the national political police, the FBI, under four administrations ... by

13130-448: The public. His tax advisor, Edward L. Morgan, became the fourth law-enforcement official to be charged with a crime during Watergate . John Requard Jr., accused of leaking the Nixon tax returns, collected delinquent taxes in the slums of Washington. In his words: "We went after people for nickels and dimes, many of them poor and in many cases illiterate people who didn't know how to deal with

13260-493: The raid on his home. In order to eliminate black militant leaders whom they considered dangerous, the FBI is believed to have worked with local police departments to target specific individuals, accuse them of crimes they did not commit, suppress exculpatory evidence and falsely incarcerate them. Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt , a Black Panther Party leader, was incarcerated for 27 years before a California Superior Court vacated his murder conviction, ultimately freeing him. Appearing before

13390-635: The reasons for his famous statement: "Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got." So controversial was this leak, that most later US presidents released their tax returns (though sometimes only partially). These returns can be found online at the Tax History Project. By the end of the Second World War, the IRS was handling sixty million tax returns each year, using a combination of mechanical desk calculators, accounting machines , and pencil and paper forms. In 1948 punch card equipment

13520-419: The responsible community and to liberals who have vestiges of sympathy"; and to "prevent the long-range GROWTH of militant black organizations, especially among youth". Dr. King was said to have potential to be the "messiah" figure, should he abandon nonviolence and integrationism, and Kwame Ture was noted to have "the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way" as he was portrayed as someone who espoused

13650-789: The same lines, the Swiss Federal Railways' Transit Police—the Transportpolizei —are abbreviated as the TraPo . With the National Socialist German Workers' Party gaining power came a frenzy of government reorganisation, and with it a series of entirely new syllabic abbreviations. The single national police force amalgamated from the Schutzpolizeien of the various states became the OrPo ( Ordnungspolizei , "order police");

13780-591: The same period the program also targeted Malcolm X . While an FBI spokesman has denied that the FBI was "directly" involved in Malcolm's murder in 1965, it is documented that the Bureau worked to "widen the rift" between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad through infiltration and the "sparking of acrimonious debates within the organization", rumor-mongering, and other tactics designed to foster internal disputes, which ultimately led to Malcolm's assassination. The FBI heavily infiltrated Malcolm's Organization of Afro-American Unity in

13910-401: The secret police) and VoPo for Volkspolizei . The phrase politisches Büro , which may be rendered literally as "office of politics" or idiomatically as "political party steering committee", became Politbüro . Syllabic abbreviations are not only used in politics, however. Many business names, trademarks, and service marks from across Germany are created on the same pattern: for

14040-425: The secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret and biased informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about

14170-399: The slain leader." However, more portions of the FBI letter to King were made public in 2014 which suggested that the FBI's intent was to push King out of leadership and have "older leaders" like Roy Wilkins lead the civil right movement. The claim that the FBI's intent was to remove King from SCLC leadership was also previously backed in 1976 by the findings of the Church Committee . During

14300-540: The state KriPos together formed the "SiPo" ( Sicherheitspolizei , "security police"); and there was also the Gestapo ( Geheime Staatspolizei , "secret state police"). The new order of the German Democratic Republic in the east brought about a conscious denazification , but also a repudiation of earlier turns of phrase in favour of neologisms such as Stasi for Staatssicherheit ("state security",

14430-538: The style guides of The Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press . The U.S. government follows a style guide published by the U.S. Government Printing Office . The National Institute of Standards and Technology sets the style for abbreviations of units. Many British publications follow some of these guidelines in abbreviation: Writers often use shorthand to denote units of measure. Such shorthand can be an abbreviation, such as "in" for " inch " or can be

14560-429: The targeting is demonstrated by the inability of the Bureau to define the subjects of the programs. The Black Nationalist program, according to its supervisor, included "a great number of organizations that you might not today characterize as black nationalist but which were in fact primarily black". Thus, the nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference was labeled as a Black Nationalist "Hate Group". Furthermore,

14690-460: The targets were nonviolent and most had no connections with a foreign power. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a "potential" for violence—and nonviolent citizens who were against the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave "aid and comfort" to violent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause. The imprecision of

14820-971: The term abbreviation in loose parlance. In early times, abbreviations may have been common due to the effort involved in writing (many inscriptions were carved in stone) or to provide secrecy via obfuscation . Reduction of a word to a single letter was common in both Greek and Roman writing. In Roman inscriptions, "Words were commonly abbreviated by using the initial letter or letters of words, and most inscriptions have at least one abbreviation". However, "some could have more than one meaning, depending on their context. (For example, ⟨A⟩ can be an abbreviation for many words, such as ager , amicus , annus , as , Aulus , Aurelius , aurum , and avus .)" Many frequent abbreviations consisted of more than one letter: for example COS for consul and COSS for its nominative etc. plural consules . Abbreviations were frequently used in early English . Manuscripts of copies of

14950-420: The three decades since 1991, the IRS had a substantial decrease in the number of employees per million residents, decreasing from 451 (in 1991) to 237 (in 2021). A decrease of 47.5 percent. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the IRS began using technology such as microfilm to keep and organize records. Access to this information proved controversial, when President Richard Nixon's tax returns were leaked to

15080-411: The time it got through, I won't run through the whole story, it was aimed at the entire new left, at the women's movement, at the whole black movement, it was extremely broad. Its actions went as far as political assassination. According to the Church Committee : While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the "national security" or prevent violence, Bureau witnesses admit that many of

15210-453: The vocabulary as generic words are no longer written with capital letters nor with any periods. Examples are sonar , radar , lidar , laser , snafu , and scuba . When an abbreviation appears at the end of a sentence, only one period is used: The capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. In the past, some initialisms were styled with a period after each letter and a space between each pair. For example, U. S. , but today this

15340-464: The words in a typical SMS message are abbreviated. More recently Twitter, a popular social networking service , began driving abbreviation use with 140 character message limits. In HTML , abbreviations can be annotated using < abbr title = "Meaning of the abbreviation." > abbreviation </ abbr > to reveal its meaning by hovering the cursor . In modern English, there are multiple conventions for abbreviation, and there

15470-523: The year, Director J. Edgar Hoover declared that the centralized COINTELPRO was over, and that all future counterintelligence operations would be handled case by case. Additional documents were revealed in the course of separate lawsuits filed against the FBI by NBC correspondent Carl Stern, the Socialist Workers Party , and a number of other groups. In 1976 the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of

15600-425: Was dropped in 2022, however, following privacy concerns from government officials and the public. Alternative ID verification options have since been introduced with the goal of making IRS online tools accessible to more people. As early as the year 1918, the Bureau of Internal Revenue began using the name "Internal Revenue Service" on at least one tax form. In 1953, the name change to the "Internal Revenue Service"

15730-581: Was formalized in Treasury Decision 6038. The 1980s saw a reorganization of the IRS. A bipartisan commission was created with several mandates, among them to increase customer service and improve collections. Congress later enacted the Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 , which mandated that the agency replace its geographic regional divisions with units that serve particular categories of taxpayers. As

15860-671: Was murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen , who gave chase and fired shots into her car after noticing that her passenger was a young black man; one of the Klansmen was Gary Thomas Rowe , an acknowledged FBI informant. The FBI spread rumors that Liuzzo was a member of the Communist Party and had abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African Americans involved in the civil rights movement . FBI records show that J. Edgar Hoover personally communicated these insinuations to President Johnson. Despite this, three Klansmen would be convicted in

15990-521: Was not ratified until 1913, just before the start of the First World War . That same year, the first edition of the 1040 form was introduced. A copy of the 1913 form can be viewed online and shows that only those with annual incomes of at least $ 3,000 (equivalent to $ 92,500 in 2023) were instructed to file an income tax return. In the first year after the ratification of the 16th Amendment, no taxes were collected. Instead, taxpayers simply completed

16120-457: Was passed in 1942 as the United States entered the Second World War . This act included a special wartime surcharge. The number of American citizens who paid income tax increased from about four million in 1939 to more than forty-two million by 1945. In 1952, after a series of politically damaging incidents of tax evasion and bribery among its own employees, the Bureau of Internal Revenue

16250-495: Was phased out. Information processing in the IRS systems of the late 1960s was in batch mode; microfilm records were updated weekly and distributed to regional centers for handling tax inquiries. A project to implement an interactive, realtime system, the "Tax Administration System", was launched, that would provide thousands of local interactive terminals at IRS offices. However, the General Accounting Office prepared

16380-408: Was reorganized under a plan put forward by President Truman , with the approval of Congress. The reorganization decentralized many functions to new district offices which replaced the collector's offices. Civil service directors were appointed to replace the politically appointed collectors of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Not long after, the bureau was renamed the Internal Revenue Service. In 1954

16510-643: Was secret until March 8, 1971, when the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burgled an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania , took several dossiers, and exposed the program by passing this material to news agencies. The boxing match known as the Fight of the Century between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in March 1971 provided cover for the activist group to successfully pull off

16640-469: Was symptomatic of an attempt by people manually reproducing academic texts to reduce the copy time. Mastɔ subwardenɔ y ɔmēde me to you. And wherɔ y wrot to you the last wyke that y trouyde itt good to differrɔ thelectionɔ ovɔ to quīdenaɔ tinitatis y have be thougħt me synɔ that itt woll be thenɔ a bowte mydsomɔ. In the Early Modern English period, between the 15th and 17th centuries, the thorn Þ

16770-447: Was used for th , as in Þ ('the'). In modern times, ⟨Þ⟩ was often used (in the form ⟨y⟩ ) for promotional reasons, as in Y Olde Tea Shoppe . During the growth of philological linguistic theory in academic Britain, abbreviating became very fashionable. Likewise, a century earlier in Boston , a fad of abbreviation started that swept the United States, with

16900-480: Was used. The first trial of a computer system for income tax processing was in 1955, when an IBM 650 installed at Kansas City processed 1.1 million returns. The IRS was authorized to proceed with computerization in 1959 and purchased IBM 1401 and IBM 7070 systems for local and regional data processing centers. The Social Security number was used for taxpayer identification starting in 1965. By 1967, all returns were processed by computer and punched card data entry

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