IRS 101: Seven questions about the tea party scandal

The Internal Revenue Service is under the microscope now, as revelations have emerged that the agency wrongly targeted conservative groups seeking nonprofit status. Here’s an accounting of what has happened, along with the ramifications.

4. Why the sudden scrutiny of 501(c)(4)s?

This goes back to action at the US Supreme Court. The justices’ landmark Citizens United decision in 2010 allowed corporations and labor unions to raise and spend unlimited sums of money on elections. One channel through which to do so was section 501(c)(4) of the tax code. This carried with it two added benefits: Groups that qualify don’t have to pay taxes or identify their donors.

It’s not surprising, then, that following the high court’s ruling, applications for this designation more than doubled. This coincided with two other things: a rise in political activism on the right (2010 was a peak year for the tea party movement) and heat from campaign-finance watchdogs to crack down on abuse of the 501(c)(4) tax exemption, “which is routinely granted to overt political advocacy groups with little or no social welfare work,” according to a report in The New York Times.

Flooded with applications and pressured to weed out tax-code abusers, it appears IRS officials began using shortcuts – namely key words and phrases – to target certain applications.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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