National Liberty Federation The Obama administration moved on Tuesday to rein in the use of tax-exempt groups for political campaigning. The effort is an attempt to reduce the role of such loosely regulated yet influential super PACS as Crossroads GPS, which was co-founded by GOP political strategist Karl Rove, and Priorities USA, which ran searing ads against rivals of President Barack Obama to support his re-election last year. The Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department proposed new rules that they said would prohibit such groups from using candidate-related political activity like running advertisements, registering voters or distributing campaign literature as activities that qualify them to be tax-exempt social welfare organizations. This proposed guidance is a first critical step toward creating clear-cut definitions of political activity by tax-exempt social welfare organizations, said Mark Mazur, the Treasurys assistant secretary for tax policy. We are committed to getting this right before issuing final guidance that may affect a broad group of organizations. It will take time to work through the regulatory process and carefully consider all public feedback as we strive to ensure that the standards for tax-exemption are clear and can be applied consistently, Mazur said. The rules would become final after a lengthy comment period, the federal agencies said, giving the super PACS ample time to raise millions of dollars from anonymous donors before next years congressional elections. This is a feeble attempt by the Obama administration to justify its own wrongdoing with the IRS targeting of conservative and tea party groups,” Jay Sekulow, a lawyer representing more than three dozen of the groups in a federal lawsuit against the tax agency, told The New York Times. Todd Beamon
Posted on: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 09:34:17 +0000
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