TaxProf Blog

Paul L. Caron
Dean




Monday, May 2, 2016

The IRS Scandal, Day 1089

IRS Logo 2Breitbart, Judge Denies Kamala Harris Koch Brothers’ Donor List:

A conservative advocacy group backed by the Koch brothers won a First Amendment victory this week denying California Attorney General Kamala Harris access to the names of conservative nonprofit members and contributors.

Harris, the California Attorney General and a Democratic candidate for outgoing Senator Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat, Harris has been attempting to overturn post-Watergate reforms to the Internal Revenue Code designed to protect confidential federal tax return information by demanding access to the names of contributors to conservative nonprofits.

The Koch Brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFPF) and two other nonprofits filed lawsuits in the Central District Court in Los Angeles alleging Harris had violated the First Amendment by requiring charities that wanting to solicit contributions from Californians to disclose to the State of California all donors anywhere in the United States listed on the nonprofit’s IRS tax return Schedule B. Ms. Harris was also alleged to have attempted coercion to acquire donors’ names by threatening denial of permits and demanding huge fines for failure to comply. ...

As a result of a long history of racist and political bias, Congress passed a number of laws to ensure all charity donor information on Schedule B is protected as confidential. The federal tax code currently includes a regime of control and monitoring over state attorneys general, when they are granted access to donors’ names for legitimate law enforcement purposes. Violation by state officials is subject to civil and felony penalties.

The conservative nonprofits claimed there was a substantial risk Ms. Harris and/or her staff would leak this confidential data to their ideological opponents and her allies. The nonprofits cited various acts of lawlessness and law-breaking exposed by congressional investigators regarding Lois Lerner’s IRS staff leaking the National Organization for Marriage’s Schedule B donor information of the to their opponents. ...

Despite Harris saying she plans to appeal the court’s ruling, the issue may become moot with the U.S. House of Representative’s Ways and Means Committee passing a bill on April 28 titled Preventing IRS Abuse and Protecting Free Speech Act on a party-line vote, which would eliminate what Republicans dubbed a “superfluous IRS form, known as the Schedule B, which the IRS has used to improperly target tax-exempt organizations.”

Democrats voted against the bill, claiming that the review by the IRS is critical to ensure foreign funds do not covertly enter U.S. election politics.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/05/the-irs-scandal-day-1089.html

IRS News, IRS Scandal, Tax | Permalink

Comments

I'm a little puzzled by the last sentence of the excerpt? When the IRS become responsible for overseeing elections? Why doesn't the US create an Election Commission to oversee elections like most countries have instead of conflating tax collection and politics? It is one of the things that has been bothering me since this whole thing began, why did the US make tax collectors responsible for policing political opinion?

Posted by: max | May 2, 2016 12:43:13 PM