The Treasury Department’s New Crackdown on Dark Money Groups
By Patricia Murphy
Six months after news broke that IRS staffers had spent more than two years reviewing Tea Party groups’ efforts to register with the government as tax-exempt organizations, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday that it is planning to change the rules governing nonprofits’ political activities altogether.
The department said it plans to create a new definition of “candidate-related political activity” to clarify which activities do and do not count toward a group’s work on social welfare, the key measurement for determining an organization’s tax-exempt status. Treasury also will open the process up for the public to comment on how much political activity a group can be engaged in and still be considered a social welfare organization, and thus tax-exempt.
Included in the department’s new definition of what would not count as social welfare work would be things like voter registration drives, communications, and events that identify a specific candidate and occur within 30 to 60 days of an election; and grants to outside groups that participate in campaigns and elections.
Treasury’s announcement came after blistering criticism from Republicans, who complained that the IRS has been singling out conservative and Tea Party groups for unreasonable scrutiny, as well as Democrats, who wondered aloud why Tea Party groups or any other political groups should be deemed “social welfare” organizations by the IRS, and thus freed from tax liabilities, in the first place.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/27/the-treasury-department-s-new-crackdown-on-dark-money-groups.html
