A watchdog group today asked the Internal Revenue Service to
investigate the National Rifle Association for failing to disclose $33.5
million in political expenditures on its tax returns over a six-year
period.
In a letter to the IRS and a separate one to the Federal Election
Commission, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
cited a recent story in Yahoo News as evidence of what it believes are
multiple violations of campaign finance and tax laws by the country’s
premier gun-rights group.
A spokeswoman for the NRA called the charges “baseless and nothing more
than a PR stunt” coming from an organization with its own political
agenda. The spokeswoman, Jennifer Baker, acknowledged that the NRA had
incorrectly filled out its tax forms in previous years when it wrongly
checked a box stating that it had not engaged in any “direct or indirect
political activities.”
But she said this was a “clerical error” made by the NRA’s accounting
firm, adding that the mistake had no practical consequence and had since
been corrected. She also noted that the NRA had separately reported to
the FEC that it spent millions of dollars in “independent expenditure”
political ads.
“No one can contend that the NRA was trying to hide that we are engaged
in political activity,” she said. “The assertion that this represents
fraud on the NRA’s part is absurd.”
But Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of CREW, said that the
NRA’s explanation for the mistakes on its tax forms “just does not ring
true.”
“This is not a mom-and-pop shop,” Bookbinder said in an interview.
“This is a sophisticated, multimillion-dollar organization with many
layers of review. It’s hard to believe they simply missed this year
after year.”
The CREW complaint was prompted by an April 21, 2015, Yahoo News story
by independent journalist Alan Berlow disclosing that $1 contributions
he made to the NRA’s lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action,
through the organization’s website were misrouted to its political
action committee, known as the Political Victory Fund, or PVF.
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