Here’s the real question in the scandal over the IRS targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups: If it is perfectly all right for President Obama’s surrogate mouthpiece, Organizing for Action, to spend millions of dollars promoting the president’s agenda, why is it a potential violation of federal tax law for other organizations to oppose that agenda?
Organizing for Action (OFA) is a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organization, the same status that hundreds of conservative-leaning organizations began applying for after Obama became president in 2009.
OFA just announced it is making a seven-figure ad buy—that is, north of $10 million—to persuade the American people that ObamaCare is great.
That effort conforms with OFA’s stated purpose, “Organizing for Action is a nonprofit organization established to support President Obama in achieving enactment of the national agenda Americans voted for on Election Day 2012.”
OFA claims that it “will operate as a ‘social welfare’ organization within the meaning of section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code,” but everyone knows it is an overtly political organization. And yet it’s application for c4 status sailed through.
Reporters and pundits seemed very exercised over whether Tea Party groups would keep their political activity under the 50 percent threshold applied to c4s, yet OFA was seldom if ever even mentioned in their various reports and commentaries.
But while the IRS is harassing right-leaning groups for seeking a c4 status, even though contributions to such groups are not tax deductible, it is simultaneously winking at 501(c)(3) organizations that are potentially defrauding the public.
CNN, in conjunction with the Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting, has just reported on the 50 worst charities. Contributions to c3 organizations like them are tax deductible, which means there is a higher standard of accountability—which the IRS apparently isn’t demanding.
Many of the c3s—which claim to support very sympathetic groups such as police, firefighters, children, or fighting certain diseases—actually give less than 5 percent of their fundraising receipts to the causes they support. So the IRS has time to harass c4 applicants, who do not get a tax break for donations, while ignoring questionable c3s that do.
It’s good to know that the public is finally scrutinizing the IRS, rather than the other way around.
June 18, 2013