Julie with a B

Monday, March 21, 2005
 
IRS on everyone's mind
The IRS is always money motivated but maybe not in the way you might think. If you make under a certain amount of money you are much less likely to be audited. The IRS itself is incredibly underfunded, often operating on a shoe-string with many empoyees paid the bottom dollar. So if they spend time on something, they tend to go for the entities that they can hope to get something from. Not in the way you might imagine, not to search randomly amounst those with large incomes, but those who really operate on the shady side of tax law.
Non-profits tend not to be in this category. There is considerable oversight of large non-profit entities, because people want their money to go to the activities they have donated it to. There is a fair amount of public scrutiny from watch dogs of every stripe.

So why would the IRS step up its audit work on these entities?

From today's NYTimes:
"Roughly a dozen nonprofit organizations have publicly contended that government agencies and Congressional offices have used reviews, audits, investigations, law enforcement actions and the threat of a loss of federal money to discourage them from activities and advocacy that in any way challenge government policies, and nonprofit leaders say more are complaining quietly."

""In previous administrations, there's been the occasional instance of what might appear to be retaliation, but when it started happening in a serial way, it began to look like a pattern to us," said Kay Guinane, counsel for the nonprofit advocacy project of OMB Watch, a government watchdog group that has published two reports on the issue."

- posted by JulieB @ 8:10 AM
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