A majority of voters oppose giving bonuses to IRS employees for their work last year, and almost half believe the agency broke the law when it targeted conservative groups for heightened scrutiny, a new poll has found.
According to a
Rasmussen Reports survey conducted Feb. 8-9, 68 percent of likely voters say they are against giving IRS workers millions of dollars in performance bonuses, compared with just 15 percent who support it.
Forty-nine percent of the 1,000 respondents also believe the IRS broke the law when it singled out the tea party groups, even though President Barack Obama
recently said "there was not even a smidgen of corruption" in the agency.
Twenty-five percent do not believe the IRS broke the law, while another 25 percent are not sure, the survey found.
The new IRS Commissioner, John Koskinen, has been criticized recently for his decision
to reinstate 2013 performance bonuses for the embattled agency's workers, as six separate investigations continue into the targeting scandal.
Meanwhile, 73 percent of voters remain highly skeptical that criminal charges will be brought against any government employees involved in the controversy.
Republicans
last month attacked the Obama administration after an anonymous leak to the media suggested that the FBI had decided it would not be pursing criminal charges for anyone caught up in the scandal, despite the Justice Department's ongoing criminal probe.
The Rasmussen survey also found that 57 percent of voters believe it's likely that other government agencies also targeted tea party and conservative groups, and 50 percent regard the IRS matter as a serious scandal.