But her case is receiving new attention after her congressman, Republican Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, recounted her ordeal during a high-profile House committee hearing on the IRS practice of singling out conservative groups. He claimed she was audited and visited by several different federal agencies — including the FBI — in the years after she formed her Tea Party group.

“She received four FBI inquires,” Brady said. “And her business received unsolicited audits, unscheduled audits.”

Engelbrecht is the founder of True the Vote, a Houston-based group that says its goal is to root out voter fraud. She’s claimed for years that the Internal Revenue Service was picking on her, asking her over-the-top personal questions, demanding binders full of paperwork and going after her family’s oil field machinery business.

After her case was spotlighted at Friday’s hearing, Engelbrecht explained the targeting in an interview with Fox News.

“At some point those questions cross the line,” she said.

Her troubles started, she claims, after she founded a Tea Party group called the King Street Patriots and worked as poll watcher in the local 2009 elections. She said she found major discrepancies in voting procedures and uncovered cases of political harassment and wrongdoing. She brought up the claims to local officials but they were never proved.

In July 2010, she applied for nonprofit status for two of her organizations: True the Vote and King Street Patriots.

Five months after she filed for 501(c)(4) status for KSP, Engelbrecht says the FBI Domestic Terrorism Unit called her about one of the people who had attended a KSP group meeting. Five months after that, the FBI called her again to ask “how we were doing?” A month later on June 2011, she received another FBI general inquiry, which was followed by two more in November and December.

In February 2012, the IRS asked her questions about her nonprofit application.

“The first contact we had from the IRS, in the first general round of questions, they wanted to see every Facebook posting we had made, every tweet we tweeted,” Engelbrecht told Fox News’ “Huckabee.”

Engelbrecht said IRS agents wanted to know every place she had ever spoken publicly, to whom she had spoken, what she said and her intent.

Engelbrecht said her fight for 501 (c)(3) tax exempt status for True the Vote was even more frustrating. She underwent five rounds of questioning from the IRS and still hasn’t received approval. What’s worse, she claims, is that the government also started going after her personal tax returns and those of her family’s business.

Engelbrecht says the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also conducted an unscheduled audit of Engelbrecht Manufacturing in February 2012. That was followed by another unscheduled audit in July 2012 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and another in November 2012 by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

At times, Engelbrecht said she thought about not coming forward with her story.

“I really thought that the best way I could protect my family would be to keep my head down,” she said.

Both Republicans and Democrats have lashed out against the IRS over its systematic scrutiny of conservative groups during the past two election cycles.

Engelbrecht said the questions she had the biggest problems with were the ones that focused on her family.

Calls to the FBI and IRS for comment were not immediately returned.

But when news broke that the government was using taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street banks, he started paying attention and didn’t like what he was hearing.

So the Florida father and information technology specialist decided to form a group, Unite in Action, to educate people in his area about the issues, he said. It was originally formed as a corporation before Devereaux decided to apply for tax-exempt status from the IRS.

That was two years ago. It was never approved.

“It’s all but killed us,” Devereaux told FoxNews.com. “We could lose everything. Today, it’s me and my organization, but tomorrow it could be you.”

Devereaux is among a group of activists, being represented by the American Center for Law and Justice, who are preparing to sue the federal government for the practice of targeting Tea Party groups. ACLJ Executive Director Jordan Sekulow told FoxNews.com he’ll likely file the civil suits next Wednesday or Thursday on behalf of more than a dozen Tea Party groups who say they were singled out by the IRS and had their tax-exempt status severely delayed or denied altogether.

The suits, combined with congressional inquiries and an FBI probe, signal that the heated hearing on Capitol Hill Friday – with the outgoing IRS chief – was just the start of a protracted legal and political battle over the scandal.

Sekulow said the number of plaintiffs in the civil suit are growing as is the list of who his organization wants held accountable. It’s still unclear whether the organization will file as a class-action or individually in the 17 different states where the complaints originate.

Litigation could take months or years and for some like Devereaux, time isn’t on their side.

While initially waiting for IRS approval, Devereaux dipped into his own bank account, maxed out credit cards and even borrowed money from friends so his group could put on a civic-engagement training session at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington. His goal was to eventually set up a steady stream of revenue for a tax-exempt nonprofit.

The next time Devereaux heard from the IRS, they had requested details and credentials on every single speaker and all the educational materials provided in the 78 classes held at the hotel. The IRS also wanted information on all 45 vendors, their credentials and a donor list.

Devereaux refused.

Five rounds of IRS letters later, and United in Action’s tax-exempt status is still in limbo.

If they are denied, Devereaux’s group would owe the federal government “somewhere in the neighborhood of $70,000 in back taxes,” he said, referring to money he would owe the government on donations.

“It’s more than we have in our bank account,” he said.

He’s not alone.

Waco Tea Party President Toby Walker said her group applied for a 501(c)(4) status in July 2010. She’d call the IRS from time to time to check on the progress but was basically told, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ she said.

Then in February 2012, the IRS finally made contact.

Walker said she was asked questions that went well beyond the purview of the agency’s authority. They wanted to know everything about the Waco Tea Party group, their relationships with public officials, lists of volunteers and every single news story the group had ever been mentioned in.

Walker said the request was so lengthy and intrusive that had she complied with the demands, she “would have needed a U-haul truck of about 20 feet.”

While Walker’s group was finally granted tax-exempt status in March 2013, she said a lot of damage has already been done. She said people were afraid to support her group financially because they had not received the IRS-stamped status.

Others were afraid that they might be targeted by the IRS if they supported Walker’s group publicly. Having one of the most powerful government agencies angry at them wasn’t a risk many people were willing to take. And so the group suffered, she said.

“We spent thousands of our own dollars fighting this,” she said. “If this happens to one organization in America, we should all be outraged.”

Allegations that the IRS had been targeting conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status date back years but a government report released Wednesday backed up the claims. The White House has spent most of the week trying to contain the fallout from the scandal. “Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it,” President Obama said earlier this week.

By Friday, two of the agency’s top tax officials had been removed from their posts. One, outgoing acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller, was grilled Friday morning in the House Ways and Means Committee by Republican and Democratic lawmakers who demanded answers on why the unfair practice of targeting conservative groups was allowed to continue on his watch.

An official close to Miller told Fox News, shortly after Obama’s brief announcement, that the IRS chief was “set to resign the position of acting commission as of early June.” He was planning to leave the IRS entirely a “couple of months later, regardless of the current controversy,” the source said.

These details were not mentioned by the president as he announced Wednesday evening Miller was resigning. Obama spoke following a meeting with Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew  and other top department officials in which they reviewed a highly critical inspector general’s report on the practice. The report concluded poor management allowed agents to improperly target Tea Party and other groups for more than 18 months, starting in 2010.

Obama said Lew asked for the resignation and Miller agreed, after being on the job since November 2012.

“Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it,” Obama said from the White House.

Republicans, who along with Democrats have slammed the IRS for the practice, welcomed the resignation Wednesday but made clear they would continue to investigate and press for accountability.

Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., said the resignation “is a necessary first step but more heads need to roll.”

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., reacting to the claim that Miller was leaving anyway, said it seemed like he was a “perfect scapegoat” for the administration.

Miller’s resignation was part of three-step plan Obama outlined to fix the problem.

The other steps are to put in place the safeguards recommended in the IG report and to work with Congress as it investigates.

“The good news is we can fix this,” Obama said.

Miller became acting commissioner after Commissioner Douglas Shulman completed his five-year term. Shulman had been appointed by President George W. Bush.

The president has proceeded cautiously since the IRS controversy was made public Friday. While he initially said the accusations were “outrageous,” he also said he wanted to wait until the report was released before addressing what should be done to hold accountable those responsible.

Obama said he would hold a press conference Thursday.

The report lays much of the blame on IRS supervisors in Washington who oversaw a group of specialists in Cincinnati who screened applications for tax-exempt status. It does not indicate that Washington initiated the targeting of conservative groups, but it does say a top supervisor in Washington did not adequately supervise agents in the field even after she learned the agents were acting improperly.

The Justice Department is also investigating the IRS targeting, as are three congressional committees.

Sources told Fox News that Miller will remain on the job “for a couple of weeks.”

The House Ways and Means Committee said after the announcement of Miller’s resignation that he still will attend a hearing Friday.

And the House Committee on Oversight and Government Affairs sent a letter Wednesday afternoon to the IRS  requesting five employees named in the IG audit be made available for transcribed interviews by committee staff.

The Republican-led committee wants to start the interviews Monday.

The names and titles of the IRS employees requested are Holly Paz, a director; John Shafer, a manager; Gary Muthert, a screener; Liz Hofacre, a case coordinator; and Joseph Herr, a manager.

“The resignation of Steven Miller is a positive and important step as this agency struggles to try to regain the public’s trust,” said Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. “A clean slate at the IRS with new leadership is imperative to fix this egregious encroachment on the lives of honest, hard-working Americans whose only sin was that they want to express their beliefs.”

Earlier in the day, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney sidestepped a question about whether Obama still had confidence in Miller, saying he wouldn’t discuss personnel matters. He said Obama has expressed his overall view that IRS personnel had acted inappropriately.

“He wants to see that the actions taken, as revealed by the Treasury report, that are inappropriate, are met with consequences,” Carney said. “He will make clear to Treasury Department leaders that he expects action.”

Carney said Obama wants the public to “understand and believe that the IRS applies our tax laws in a neutral and fair way to everyone.”