A goverment agency in charge of something crucial like taxes targeting citizens based on their political preferences? man, I am not from the US but that sounds utterly apalling for a democracy.
Under the Obama administration, the IRS used political keywords like "Occupy" and "Tea party" to make decisions about which groups to focus on, with limited resources. The IRS investigated both conservative and liberal political groups, with multiple investigations showing no evidence that the IRS sought to investigate more conservative groups than liberal, or of using the rules differently against conservative groups.
It's just another instance of conservatives arguing that fair treatment is oppression because they get caught by rules more. It's the same as how facebook and twitter had to kneecap their "Fake News" filters because it kept labeling conservative posts as fake news. Conservatives bitched about this claiming they are being targeted but nope, just falling afoul of the same rules.
Important to note that rules hitting one group more than others doesn't immediately signal the group is just bad actors. Consider poll screening tests from the jim crowe era. They consistently affected black people in worse ways, because it wasn't an honest and fair system, because it was designed to do so.
I have not been convinced that facebook and twitter were applying their rules unequally. If you interview Fake News barons, they tell you that they just make more money and have more success targeting conservatives, often claiming that liberals are more likely to point out their articles are low trust or "Fake news" or should be taken with a grain of salt.
No, they didn't. The IRS has no idea if a person is lefist, conservative, or anything in the middle.
There were multiple investigations into the IRS targeting political groups (not people!) applying for tax exempt status using keywords like "tea party." Those investigations found that groups across the political spectrum were targeted, not just conservative ones.
“In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), under the Obama administration, revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes.”
Further in the article you’ll learn that conservative groups were targeted more than left leaning groups.
People hate the IRS because they are a huge bureaucracy and because they did deliberately target people like them.