RSS
Follow Government & Politics Watch through your favorite RSS reader.
Tag Archives: Congress
June 14, 2011, 10:19 am
IRS Plans Monthly Updates of Tax-Exempt Roster
The Internal Revenue Service—which last week announced that 275,000 nonprofits had lost their tax-exempt status after failing to file legally required documents for three consecutive years—isn’t done trimming its list of officially registered nonprofits.
Moving forward, the tax agency plans every month to release the names of groups that fail to file their paperwork. Organizations that do not file for three years will be placed on the list, which will be separate from IRS announcements about nonprofits that have lost their tax-exempt status for other reasons.
The monthly lists won’t be nearly as large as this month’s massive release, which was the result of a 2006 law designed to help the IRS remove defunct organizations from its database of registered tax-exempt groups.
Ms. Lerner says she expects the monthly lists sometimes to include thousands of groups and sometimes…
May 11, 2011, 11:04 am
Senator Prods Medical Nonprofits to Disclose More About Industry Contributions
Sen. Charles E. Grassley has renewed his effort to get nonprofit medical groups to provide more information to the public about the money they get from pharmaceutical, medical-device, and insurance companies.
Mr. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, sent letters about the matter to all but one of the 34 organizations that he had contacted in late 2009 and early 2010, including disease advocacy groups like the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association and medical-professional groups like the American Academy of Family Physicians and North American Spine Society.
As a Chronicle investigation found, the amount of money those groups get from medical companies varies widely, as do their policies for informing the public about them.
Mr. Grassley, who has been conducting a wide-ranging investigation into financial ties between industry and the medical fields,…
April 18, 2011, 9:52 pm
Nonprofits Call for Changes to ‘Arcane’ Lobbying Rules
Independent Sector, the coalition of charities and foundations, says it is time to explore ways to change the federal rules that restrict nonprofit lobbying.
Nonprofit and legal experts, who discussed the issue at a closed-door meeting last week, criticized existing lobbying rules as “arcane” and “vague to the point of being dysfunctional,” says Diana Aviv, Independent Sector’s president.
They argued that the restrictions discourage charities from exercising their legal right to speak out about legislation that affects their missions, she says.
For example, Ms. Aviv says, few charities take advantage of provisions that allow them to use a formula to determine whether they are spending too much money on lobbying. That option was introduced by a 1976 law that sought to give organizations an alternative to existing language that was considered too vague. That language, which…
April 12, 2011, 4:56 pm
Most Community-Action Money Spared in Budget Deal
The program that President Obama singled out in his State of the Union address for a deep spending cut—Community Services Block Grants—fared relatively well in the 2011 budget deal that was hatched by lawmakers last week.
The program, which provides money to a network of community-action agencies across the country, would get $680-million for the fiscal year that ends September 30, according to details of the bill provided by the Senate Appropriations Committee. While that is $20-million less than in 2010, the cut comes nowhere near the $350-million that Mr. Obama said he wanted to trim in his 2012 budget plan.
Mr. Obama said he also wanted to make groups compete for the grants, which are now distributed according to a formula based on the number of people in poverty.
David Bradley, executive director of the National Community Action Foundation, which lobbies for and…
March 10, 2011, 6:03 pm
Lawmakers Step Up Efforts to Pull NPR Money
Congressional Republicans are stepping up efforts to stop the flow of federal money to NPR following the release of an embarrassing undercover video that prompted the public broadcaster’s chief executive to resign on Wednesday.
Three Republican senators—Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and Richard Shelby of Alabama—today urged the Senate to end the grants that NPR gets from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Unlike some of their colleagues, they singled out NPR and did not propose to kill all spending for the CPB, which provides grants to public radio and television stations across the country.
In a letter to Sen. Tom Harkin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the senators criticized “biased and highly questionable comments” made in the video by Ronald Schiller, a former top NPR fund raiser, when he met…
November 29, 2010, 12:03 pm
Liberal Deficit-Cutting Plan Proposes New Charitable Tax Credit
Three liberal groups have offered a new proposal on how to cut the federal deficit, proposing yet another way to change the charitable deduction.
The proposal—by the Century Foundation, Demos, and the Economic Policy Institute—suggests converting the federal income-tax deduction for charitable donations to a 25-percent tax credit. The credit would be available to all federal taxpayers, including those who don’t itemize or owe any income taxes.
“This would result in a net increase in the tax incentive to give for more than three-quarters of the population,” their report says, noting that most taxpayers, primarily lower-income filers, take the standard deduction instead of itemizing.
The report, “Investing in America’s Economy: A Budget Blueprint for Economic Recovery and Fiscal Responsibility,” follows two other prominent deficit-cutting plans offered in recent weeks that…
E-mail a Friend
