Satanic Temple Wins IRS Recognition as an Official House of Worship

bloomberg.com

 

Many Americans regard paying taxes as a necessary evil. If they want to worship Satan, now the IRS has officially given them a tax-exempt place to do so.

 The Internal Revenue Service has granted the same non-profit status given to churches, synagogues and mosques to The Satanic Temple, an organization in Salem, Massachusetts, that calls itself America’s first devil-worshiping church. It is now protected by federal laws governing churches that operate as charities. 

In a statement this week announcing the status, the group called itself “a non-theistic religious organization dedicated to Satanic practice and the promotion of Satanic rights.” Based in the town that hosted the Salem Witch Trials in the 17th century, the statement added that the group “understands the Satanic figure as a symbol of man’s inherent nature, representative of the eternal rebel, enlightened inquiry and personal freedom rather than a supernatural deity or being.” 

Before the ruling, the IRS regarded the group as a “religious organization,” not as a full-fledged church with a place of worship. Churches are generally exempt from filing federal returns under the tax code.

Read More

IRS Launches Investigation Of Clinton Foundation

The Daily Caller

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen referred congressional charges of corrupt Clinton Foundation “pay-to-play” activities to his tax agency’s exempt operations office for investigation, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.

The request to investigate the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation on charges of “public corruption” was made in a July 15 letter by 64 House Republicans to the IRS, FBI and Federal Trade Commission (FTC). They charged the foundation is “lawless.”

The initiative is being led by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican who serves as the vice chairwoman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which oversees FTC. The FTC regulates public charities alongside the IRS.

The lawmakers charged the Clinton Foundation is a “lawless ‘pay-to-play’ enterprise that has been operating under a cloak of philanthropy for years and should be investigated.”

Koskinen’s July 22 reply came only a week after the House Republicans contacted the tax agency. It arrived to their offices Monday, the first opening day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

Read more
 

Appeals court quashes IRS tax-return preparer crackdown

Reuters

 A appeals court on Tuesday upheld a lower court ruling that quashed the U.S. Internal Revenue Service's authority to regulate tax-return preparers, dealing a blow to the Obama administration's bid to fight tax preparation fraud.

A federal court judge had invalidated test-taking and continuing education requirements the IRS wanted to impose on hundreds of thousands of unregulated tax-return preparers.

"We agree with the District Court that the IRS's statutory authority ... cannot be stretched so broadly as to encompass authority to regulate tax-return preparers," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said in its unanimous ruling.

The latest decision means the status quo will prevail for now in an industry led by H&R Block Inc, a handful of mid-tier firms, and thousands of tiny, mom-and-pop firms.

Tax return fraud is a growing problem, and in 2011, the IRS moved to regulate unlicensed tax return preparers for the first time, with a program requiring up to 700,000 of them to meet testing and education requirements.

Institute for Justice in 2012, a libertarian group, challenged the program, arguing Congress did not give the IRS the authority to regulate tax preparers.

In January 2013, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg issued an injunction halting the program. The Justice Department appealed his decision and lost in a ruling written by Judge Brett Kavanaugh for three-judge appellate panel.

The Justice Department and IRS did not immediately comment after the appellate decision.

Together, tax return preparation firms annually help about 80 million Americans comply with a complex tax code.

"It's a big win for tax preparers," said Dan Alban, the lawyer for the Institute for Justice who argued the case.

The case is Sabina Loving et al v. Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, No. 13-5061.

(Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Jeffrey Benkoe)

New Filings Shed Light on Hundreds of Millions in Dark Money Spending

Open Secrets
Robert Maguire 

It's been more than a year since voters went to the polls, after months of constant, targeted and often negative TV ads and mailers in what would be the most expensive election ever.

There are still unanswered questions, though, about how a significant portion of that barrage was paid for, with some of the answers just starting to trickle in. 

Politically active nonprofits reported spending a record $336 million in 2012 -- not including many millions more they spent in the form of issue ads that weren't required to be reported to the Federal Election Commission. Dark money groups -- 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) groups that don't, and aren't required to, disclose their donors to the public -- accounted for the vast majority of the spending. 

 

Though their donors will likely never be made public, these groups do file critical financial information with the IRS that gives the public a sense of how the groups financed and coordinated their political activities in 2012 -- long after the fact. Last Friday, Nov. 15, many of the most prominent and well financed dark money groups active in 2012 submitted their annual 990 tax forms to the IRS.

The Center for Responsive Politics is collecting those as quickly as we can and reporting on newsworthy findings in OpenSecrets Blog. 

In addition, as the filings come in, we're manually inputting the data for display in our political nonprofits section. We play a unique role here, because even though the documents are public, the IRS does not provide them in a searchable database, nor does it process the information they contain and provide it in a machine-readable form.

The data we input in the coming weeks will add to the more than 16,000 records CRP has already entered, cataloging more than $400 million in grants to political nonprofits since 2008.

Visualized context

Using data that we've already input, we're also unveiling a new, dynamic visualization that shows how a large and growing amount of anonymous money has flowed through an expanding network of nonprofits and into elections around the country.  

The visualization -- produced with the help of designer and data journalist Anna Flagg -- can be found on the grants over time page of the political nonprofits section. Though this data was drawn from filings submitted to both the IRS and the FEC, it was largely created by CRP and does not exist anywhere else, including the agencies charged with overseeing the activities of politically active nonprofits.  

The visualization focuses on the top 10 most politicized nonprofits, tracking the churn of money into and out of each group as it moves from anonymous donors to its ultimate destination as spending reported to the FEC. (Keep in mind it does not yet include any of the 2012 data that has been coming in over the last week.)

The vertical bars in the middle represent different groups, some of which act only as donors while others wear multiple hats as donors, recipients and political spenders. The height of the bar represents the amount of money flowing into the group that ultimately would be spent on politics, either directly by the group or by the group's grant recipients.  

Users can click on any of the vertical bars, and then use the slider at the top to see the group's evolution as its receipts, grants and political spending fluctuate from election to election. The FEC and IRS data are matched up by the start date and end date of the donor group's IRS filings. The dates in the slider signify a date that will be found within the start date and end date of all of the filings represented below.  

This visualization is only the beginning. Along with adding in new 2012 data as it comes in, we'll also be posting new, complementary charts and links to the display to direct users to sections of the site with relevant information.  

Reporting the 2012 filings

OpenSecrets Blog has been reporting on the most interesting aspects of the new filings as they come in.  Over the next few weeks, we will update this post to link to our stories, and highlight reports elsewhere that use documents and data from CRP.  

Our recent Shadow Money Trail posts thus far:

• ATR's Tax Forms Raise Questions About Use of Crossroads Grant, "Social Welfare" Purpose: Americans for Tax Reform's IRS filing triggers questions about whether it kept its political spending under 50 percent, as tax rules require of social welfare nonprofits, and whether it spent most of a grant from Crossroads GPS on political activity.

• Americans for Prosperity Helped Churn Koch-Linked Money: In 2012, the Koch-linked Americans for Prosperity spent more than it had spent in the previous ten years combined. Tens of millions went for ads attacking President Obama, and some went back into the Koch network. 

• Priorities USA Relied on Handful of Donors: The dark money group founded by former Obama aides spent more than half of its money on grants to other politically active nonprofits, including one mysterious group run by very well-connected Democratic operatives. 

• Small Trade Associations Give Big to Crossroads GPS, Others: Crossroads GPS raised $180 million last year, including one donation of $22.5 million. But it was also pulling in some much smaller grants from construction industry and nursing home trade groups, OpenSecrets.org has learned.

• PhRMA, API Give Little to Dark Money Groups, Shun Liberal Ones: Top trade groups for the drug and oil industries didn't ante up big for dark money groups, but those that received grants were all conservative.

Elsewhere, stories have used documents obtained by CRP or expanded on reports by CRP. 

• The Daily Beast looked into the Chamber of Commerce and the League of Conservation Voters using filings obtained by CRP. 

• The Center for Public Integrity used 990s obtained by CRP as it looked into the American Energy Alliance's claim that the $1.3 million it spent on ads in the 2012 elections were not actually political. In another rundown of new filings, CPI also cited tax documents and data from CRP. 

• The Huffington Post cited CRP's grant data pertaining to the liberal Patriot Majority USA in a report about labor money given to the organization. In two other posts on Crossroads GPS, the Huffington Post cited our reports on Crossroads receipts from trade associations and its large grant to Americans for Tax Reform. 

US Agencies Put Together ‘McCarthy-esque’ List With Americans’ Personal Data to Find ‘Untrustworthy’ Workers

The Dissenter


Thousands of Americans had their personal data passed on to US agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, Internal Revenue Service and National Security Agency as part of an effort to uncover “untrustworthy federal workers,” according to a new report from McClatchy Newspapers.

The report from Marisa Taylor describes the creation of an “unprecedented” list of Americans that was disseminated widely with ease when there was no clear reason for sharing this data at all.

According to Taylor, two men are under criminal investigation for “purportedly teaching people how to pass lie detector tests.” The government sought to uncover information on government employees, who may have been using polygraph-beating techniques (which are unproven to work), while trying to obtain their security clearances. The result was “4,904 people—along with many of their Social Security numbers, addresses and professions – to nearly 30 federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.”

“Nurses, firefighters, police officers and private attorneys” all had their personal information handed over. Additionally, a “psychologist, a cancer researcher, and employees of Rite Aid, Paramount Pictures, the American Red Cross and Georgetown University” all had their data shared.

Most of the individuals had never received any one-on-one training from “one of the men being investigated.” They had bought his books or DVDs. The reason for training, in some cases, was also to find out if their spouses had been unfaithful. However, federal agencies passed on the data of thousands of Americans, which they intended to keep in case one of those individuals applied for a job with the agency in the future.

One lawyer, whose husband’s name ended up on the list, told McClatchy, “It’s very alarming and McCarthy-esque in its zeal. To put a person on a secret list because they bought the ‘wrong book’ or are associated with someone who did is overly paranoid.”

Read More