On the record, Jessica Peck isn’t thinking much about a potential Internal Revenue Service investigation into her Denver-based watchdog Open Government Institute.
Colorado Ethics Watch this week filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service against the Open Government Institute of Colorado (OGI), asking for an investigation of actions allegedly taken by OGI to benefit the re-election campaign of U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, which Ethics Watch said could call into question OGI’s pending non-profit 501(c)(3) status.
Conservative activists and some Republican lawmakers are up in arms about what they describe as the Internal Revenue Service conducting a partisan and ideologically driven campaign against tea party groups around the country. They claim that progressive organizations are not experiencing the same level of scrutiny. However, some progressive groups say they have had similar experiences with the IRS, and at least one expert dismisses the notion that the government is engaged in an ideological witch hunt.
Catholic Answers, an information and advocacy group run by non-clergy members, last week asked the US Supreme Court to examine the way the Internal Revenue Service determines whether or not a nonprofit group has engaged in improper political activity. The group drew the attention of the IRS after criticizing Sen. John Kerry during his bid for president in 2004. To many, a case of this kind will seem long overdue, given the increasingly politicized nature of religious organizations in the United States over the last four decades.
It wasn’t enough for Doug Bruce to dedicate a large part of his life to reducing the taxes Coloradans pay. He apparently had to take it a step further and make his quest personal as well as professional.
As Tax Day looms, several recent reports serve as reminders that the wealthiest Americans give up far less of their income in taxes than the rest of the country.
Legally married gay couples this month will be filing joint tax returns to the IRS, pressing the federal government to again acknowledge that, by failing to recognize gay marriage, it routinely asks U.S. citizens to lie on their tax forms. “More people are refusing to lie on those forms even though the government is telling them to,” said Nadine Smith, director of gay rights group Equality Florida. Smith is gay and married and she says that she and her partner will not lie on their tax form this year. “It would be both dishonest and deeply humiliating to now disavow each other or our marriage and declare ourselves single,” she said.
In targeting the medical marijuana industry, the IRS is pursuing action that could send shockwaves through the medical marijuana industry — or even destroy it completely.
New Leadership Colorado would seem to owe roughly $44,000 in IRS fines for its brief stint as a political hit team this campaign season. Add that sum to the $3.4 million the Treasury’s Inspector General estimates the IRS (pdf)…
Egged on by the conservative Alliance Defense Fund legal firm, 33 church leaders across the country have vowed to break federal law during their sermons this Sunday, Sept. 28. The so-called “Pulpit Freedom Day” action is a call for pastors to flaunt federal law and deliver full-on endorsements of political candidates.
But some religious leaders — including Richard Cizik of the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals, and Catholic Archbishop John Favalora of Miami — have warned pastors not to risk losing the benefits that come from tax-exempt status.
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