NM Sheriff Stands Against IRS & Federal Marshals - Cancels Land Sale

It’s good news and its happening now  – County sheriffs throughout the land are beginning to stir by standing up against the IRS and the corporations for the Constitutional rights of their citizens - - let’s appreciate them as they do their duty and apply the Rule of Law.

Let’s get behind our deputy sheriffs all over. While you’re at it ask your state government politicians why they haven’t reclaimed your sovereign state lands from the federal government. It’s yours, why let the fedgov & corporations live off it?

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Tim Brown , 02.09.2015

Constitutional Sheriffs are becoming more vocal and demonstrating why they are a valuable asset to freedom and their communities. The latest sheriff to take a constitutional stand is Eddy County, New Mexico's Scott London, the first sheriff in twenty-five to stand up to the IRS against a tyrannical attempt to sell a citizen in his county's land without due process.

Priscilla Jones provides the background information for the sheriff's actions:

Approximately ten days before Christmas, U.S. Marshals broke in the door of Carter's rental property with their guns drawn. The tenant was a young mother with a new baby—home alone while her husband was at work. Sheriff London was called to the property to intervene. He advised the Marshals that Carter's case was in appeal and he deserved due process. They threatened to arrest London, but he stood his ground and they backed off....

The Taxation & Revenue Department ordered Carter to cease "engaging in business in New Mexico" until his arbitrary tax debt was paid. Carter appealed this injunction on the grounds that it was both unconstitutional and vague, as it deprived him of his right to make a living and also prohibited him from, "carrying on or causing to be carried on any activity with the purpose of direct or indirect benefit."

Kent Carter's property was in the sights of the corrupt Internal Revenue Service and the Department of the Treasury has slated a sale of the properties in question for the 19^th of February. When Sheriff London found out about it, he issued the following certified letter on February 4. 

Sheriff London cites Section 18 of the New Mexico Constitution and the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution as the basis for his stand against the federal tyrants.

"Thus I am notifying you that under compulsion to my oath to the Constitution of the United States of America and the Constitution of the State of New Mexico, I shall not allow the sales of these three properties on 19 February 2015," he wrote.

Sheriff Mack, founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association praised London's actions.

"Many officers have stood up over the years for the rights of citizens being victimized by the federal government," Mack said. "But Sheriff London is the first one to stand up to the IRS since the early 1990s." Mack said, "His actions show courage and humility. London is setting a good example for the rest of our sheriffs."

KrisAnne Hall documents why sheriffs like London are so important to the people in her excellent article on what is taking place in New Mexico.

"Short of physical resistance, due process and community oversight (a jury of your peers) was intended to be some of the greatest protections against government threat against property," Hall wrote.  "So important was to be the protection of due process, that it is placed multiple times in our Bill of Rights."

"For example, the 5th Amendment in the Bill of Rights declares that '…nor shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law;'  The 7th Amendment also declares, 'In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right to trial by jury, shall be preserved…'" she adds. 

"Both of those Amendments express the due process protections guaranteed to the people.  Sheriff London accurately states in his letter to the IRS that Mr. Carter has NOT exhausted his right to due process.  Yet, the IRS under the auspices of Judge Brack and the US District court, are attempting to deprive Mr. Carter of his property with full knowledge that Mr. Carter's right to due process is still engaged."

Currently, 100% of the Carter's Social Security benefits have been seized every month by the IRS. Under the law, Carter claims that the IRS can take no more than 15% of his Social Security benefits, but they've not only taken 100% of them, they've even deprived him of $2800.00 via his bank account.

Carter said the IRS is "worse than the mafia" and called them a "lie."

"Why should they be able to take anything?" he asked.

One court document, according to Jones indicates that Carter owed $145,000, which Carter maintains has no basis and was "pulled out of thin air" by an assessing agent. However, now the IRS claims that he owes upwards of $890,000! Carter says that number "doubled with the stroke of a pen."

"The IRS fabricates evidence against citizens by pulling numbers out of a hat and adding fees," said Sheriff Mack. "They wear people down emotionally and financially until they can't take it anymore. No citizen should ever have to fight the IRS for decades in order to keep his land."

Ms. Hall also provided updated information on Carter's motion. She wrote on February 7:

I have spoken to Kent Carter.  He filed a Motion to Stay the judges decision and was DENIED with NO explanation.  If I were to make a professional guess as to why the court denied it, it would be because he filed the Motion outside the "allowed" time frame.  That is no excuse for the court to not make that explanation, but there you have it.  I also spoke to Sheriff London. 

He received a call yesterday from the acting Under Secretary of the Department of Treasury, Matthew Rutherford.  Mr. Rutherford claims this case has been decided by the appellate court already in favor of the IRS.  If he is correct that is a record pace decision.  
Sheriff London told Mr. Rutherford that he had better present proof of that before he will ever consider allowing the sales to take place.  Apparently Mr. Rutherford was not at all happy about that.  This could get very interesting!

Perhaps it is not only Sheriff London that needs to take a physical stand at the properties of Mr. Carter, but also the people of New Mexico, just as Americans did for Cliven Bundy and his ranch.

As our forefather Benjamin Franklin once wisely said, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

via  federaloutpost

IRS Seizes Money and Property without Criminal Charges

The fundamental issue of the IRS not being Constitutional to begin with has fallen off the table, so we fiddle with the crimes associated with its creation and retain the "legalized" plunder by Government carrying on as usual and unlawful. Sen. Rand Paul's FAIR Act mentioned below is just a tool to continue the nonsense and unlawful acts of the IRS. Shameful. We have no statesmen now, nor none on the horizon.

We're in a deep morass my friends, and tweaking what's unlawful to fit our immoral culture under the rule of law, will surely be certain, in the end, to sink us beyond redemption.

The remedy called for is not another stake in liberty's heart with a Con-Con, just Nullification by an individual state as authorized under our Constitutional rule of law. Why do the state legislatures still allow the fedgov to plunder their citizens and businesses un-Constitutionally?

The InjusticeforJustice blog which authored the below is an IRS 501c(3) non-profit which is a good example of a group benefiting from a continuance of the IRS. Its abolition would be the termination of their subsidy as a special interest group favoring a continuance of the IRS! A dog you've learned does not bite the hand that feeds him. 

There are more than a million other trough feeders as the IJ, so they alone are only one special interest in a big audience.

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Seize First, Question Later - Release: 2-3-2015

Too Easy to Seize: New Report on IRS Forfeitures ...Highlights Need for Broad Civil Forfeiture Reform

Arlington, Va.—Thanks to federal civil forfeiture laws, the Internal Revenue Service has seized millions of dollars from thousands of Americans’ bank accounts without proof of criminal wrongdoing, according to a new report from the Institute for Justice (IJ). The IRS practice of “seize first, ask questions later” highlights the need for broad reform of federal civil forfeiture laws that impose substantial burdens on property owners and make seizing property—and profiting from it—too easy for law enforcement.

The IRS took the “seize first, question later” approach when it cleaned out the bank account of Carole Hinders’ Mexican restaurant in Spirit Lake, Iowa. Carole’s restaurant only accepted cash, so she made frequent cash deposits. To the IRS, this was evidence of illegal “structuring”—deliberately depositing or withdrawing cash in amounts under $10,000 to evade federal reporting requirements imposed on banks. And under federal civil forfeiture law, that was all the IRS needed to seize her money and force Carole into court to try to prove her innocence and win her money back, which she eventually did more than a year-and-a-half after it was seized.

Stories like Carole’s are increasingly common, according to a new report issued by the Institute for Justice.

“The IRS data we obtained give rare insight into how federal forfeiture laws work and how they affect people caught in their web,” said Dick Carpenter, IJ’s Director of Strategic Research. “Most publicly available federal forfeiture data don’t reveal key details like whether forfeitures followed civil or criminal procedures, how long they take to resolve, or what alleged crimes justified seizures.”

According to IRS data obtained by IJ and detailed in the new report:

• From 2005 to 2012, the IRS seized more than $242 million for suspected structuring violations in more than 2,500 cases, and annual seizures increased fivefold over those eight years.
• At least a third of those cases, like Carole’s, arose from nothing more than a series of cash transactions under $10,000, with no other criminal activity alleged.
• Four out of five IRS structuring-related forfeitures were civil, not criminal, so the IRS faced a lower evidentiary standard and did not need to secure a conviction to forfeit the cash, and owners had fewer rights in fighting to win it back.
• Like Carole, owners likely face a long legal battle to win their money back: The average IRS structuring-related forfeiture took nearly a year to complete.
• Nearly half of the money initially seized by the IRS was not ultimately forfeited, raising concerns that the IRS seized more than it could later justify to forfeit the cash.

READ THE FULL REPORT

Seize First, Question Later: The IRS and Civil Forfeiture

By IJ Director of Strategic Research Dick Carpenter and IJ Attorney Larry Salzman

“It’s no accident the IRS overwhelmingly prefers civil forfeiture to criminal forfeiture,” said IJ Attorney Larry Salzman. “It allows them to seize cash without the effort of investigating whether the property owner did anything wrong, let alone convicting anyone of a crime. Under civil forfeiture, the burden is then on property owners to go to court and spend a year or more trying to prove their innocence to win their money back.”

“The IRS’s forfeiture activity exposes the rotten core of federal civil forfeiture law,” added IJ Senior Attorney Scott Bullock. “Allowing law enforcement to take property from people without convicting them of a crime and then profit from the seizure will inevitably lead to abuse.”

The Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration (FAIR) Act, recently introduced by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., would curb structuring-related seizures and correct defects in federal civil forfeiture law that stack the deck against people whose property is seized and enable law enforcement agencies to profit from forfeiture.

After Carole’s story and other abuses grabbed headlines, the IRS announced a new policy of only seizing money derived from illegitimate sources. However, as long as the law remains as it is, people remain at risk of unjustified seizures.   “The new IRS policy on structuring seizures amounts to ‘Trust us—from now on, we’re only taking money from real criminals,’” said Salzman. “But why was the IRS taking money from innocent people in the first place? Civil forfeiture makes taking cash and property too easy, and the IRS’s track record with structuring-related seizures is a vivid example of why a policy of ‘trust us’ is not enough—for the IRS or any law enforcement agency.  Congress must act to protect all property owners from unjustified seizures.”

For more information on IJ’s Forfeiture Initiative visit: endforfeiture.com

via injusticeforjustice

Largest bracket of taxpayers in US made up by those making $15,000 a year or less...and

...  Half of all federal taxes paid by those making $250,000 or more. Sample $50,000 budget.

Posted by mybudget360

New IRS tax filing data sheds an interesting light on the American economy. Americans for the most part comply with paying their taxes as measured against other countries. However, when we look at tax data we get an interesting picture on the low wage economy. As it turns out, the largest tax bracket comes in the form of those making $15,000 or less per year (this group makes up 25% of tax filings).

What the data also finds is that households making $250,000 a year or more make up 2.4% of filers but pay 26% of all federal income tax. So when we hear about large spending proposals we have two ways to fund them. It means higher taxes or simply more deficit spending. We’ve already covered how inflation is really hitting the family budget even though we continue to hear stories to the contrary. Just look at the actual numbers on real life spending. The IRS data always gives us a nice look at how household spending is measuring up.

IRS tax data

Over 90 million tax returns report a household income of $50,000 per year or less. What this means is that over 60 percent of American households are reporting annual income of less than $50,000 per year. According to Census data the typical American household makes approximately $50,000 per year. Since most families are part of the two-income trap, the per worker wage of $27,000 per year makes sense.

Take a look at the IRS data below:

 Source: IRS

The bulk of the federal income tax is paid by those making $50,000 per year to $200,000. Then you have another big chunk of taxes being paid by those making $250,000 or more. Yet this is strictly federal income tax. This fails to capture the following taxes:

 -Social Security taxes
-Medicare taxes
-Sales taxes
-Property taxes

When these taxes are included, the burden is large on everyone. We can argue the merits of tax rates or the politics of paying taxes but the reality is, if we continue to run current deficits and spend as we do there will be more taxes or more debt. That is simply the reality of the situation.

Take a look at current expenses and revenues:

The government is spending over $3.8 trillion but brining in less than $3.4 trillion. If this was a regular household it would be digging a deeper hole each and every year. Yet the government has the ability to digitally print debt and fund its way out. However you have the slow methodical process of causing inflation to hit working class Americans which is the bulk of households based on IRS tax data.

I’ve covered budgets on households making $46,000 a year. Here is a budget for someone living in a high cost market:

Housing is the big variable here since high cost areas will consume a sizable portion of your budget versus most of the country where real estate is reasonably priced. But with Wall Street buying up many rental properties, rents have gone up much faster than incomes.

The IRS tax data paints an interesting picture of our current economy and revenues. If we want to continue spending like we are, we will be facing higher taxes or more debt.

That is just the simple math of the situation.


source mybudget360

Finding the Foreign Agents

Isn't it unlawful for our congress members to receive donor contributions from foreigners and not be registered as foreign agents under FARA? Nearly every US congressman is on Israel's payroll. See the complete list HERE. Pretty unlikely that an honest game will ever be seen by the American people when the 'umpires' are on the other team!

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Posted by Philip Giraldi on February 3, 2015

One suspects that the Barack Obama/Eric Holder Justice department has little stomach for going after any organization linked to Israel... 

In monitoring the activities of foreign organizations, the DOJ often gives powerful political lobbies a pass.

 

by Philip Giraldi 

American Conservative

In high school civics classes, Americans are brought up to believe that in their nation a rule of law prevails. Justice is depicted as blind and the rules apply to everyone. All Americans will receive the same fair hearing in court or at the hands of the government. Of course the reality is that experience tells us that those who trust in impartial justice are somewhat delusional as the criminal justice and regulatory systems do not operate in a reliably mechanical fashion. Many factors determine whether a suspect actually goes to trial or whether an organization is regulated or investigated and there are a number of roadblocks along the way that influence the outcome.

One of the federal government regulatory bodies that few have heard about is the board at the United States Department of Justice’s Counterespionage Section that administers the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The original FARA was passed in 1938 just before the outbreak of war in Europe and was intended to monitor the activities of front organizations being directed by the German and Italian governments. From its inception FARA was politicized and selective. Rome and Berlin were potential enemies while the extremely active British government efforts to draw the United States into what eventually became a European and then a world war were largely ignored.

The original act was loosely worded to include anyone propagandizing for a foreign power but an amended version in 1966 narrowed the definition of whom would be covered to include only actual “agents of a foreign principal” working directly for a foreign government in an attempt to influence U.S. economic or political decision making. Since 1966 there have been no successful criminal prosecutions under FARA and nearly all compliance has been more-or-less voluntary. There have, however, been a number of civil cases and administrative resolutions in which the government asserted the viability of the act. In 2004, for example, Susan Lindauer, a former congressional staffer, was charged with taking payments from an Iraqi government source. Her case was finally dropped in 2009.

There are somewhat less than 2,000 foreign agents registered under the act representing more than 100 countries. Their names and their periodic financial and activities filings are accessible by the public at the FARA Unit office in Washington. Most are associated with law or lobbying firms that represent foreign governments as part of their business. Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was, for a time, a registered agent for Turkey when he held that account while working for the Dickstein Shapiro law firm, which he joined after leaving congress. Former Congressman Dick Gephardt also headed a company engaged in lobbying for Turkey. Both Gephardt and Hastert were involved in lobbying Congress to oppose pending legislation calling the First World War massacre of Turkish Armenians a “genocide.”

The disadvantage of registering under FARA is that you have to disclose your sources of income and you also have to detail what you are doing on behalf of the foreign government. Organizations that do not consider that they are actually directed by a foreign government or who assess their relationship to be borderline are consequently reluctant to comply.

FARA inevitably is selective in its targeting. Agents of nations hostile to the United States are pursued with some vigor while organizations linked to powerful domestic political lobbies tend to get a pass. This has been historically true of Irish republican groups as well as of the predecessor of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which was founded in 1949 as the American Zionist Council. The American Zionist Council was funded directly by the Jewish Agency for Israel. Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered the group to register in 1962 but the death of his brother led to an intense lobbying campaign to influence his strongly pro-Israel successor Lyndon B. Johnson who obligingly instructed the Justice Department to stand down.

I am sometimes asked if I have any regrets about publishing our book. As of today, my only regret is that it is not being published now. After the humiliations that Obama has endured at the hands of the Israel Lobby and the Hagel circus, we would sell even more copies and we would not face nearly as much ill-informed criticism. — Stephen Walt, co-author of the book.

Since that time repeated efforts to compel AIPAC to register have failed due to White House and Justice Department unwillingness to confront the issue but a new initiative by the Israeli government might well be construed as having crossed the line in violation of FARA. In early January the Prime Minister’s Office of the Israeli government funded a joint project to be run by the government’s National Information Directorate and StandWithUS, which has been described as an “American hasbara organization.” In Hebrew the name, hasbara, means literally “public explanation” but the expression is generally applied to anyone involved in generating pro-Israeli propaganda. It is also sometimes more politely described as a program of “perception management,” a euphemism made popular by the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon in 2004.

Finish reading>>

The IRS is a Private Collection Agency for the US Federal Reserve

This taxpayer should've had a V8

The Internal Revenue Service is considered to be a Bureau of the Department of the Tresaury; however, like the Federal Reserve, it is not part of the Federal Government (Diversified Metal Products v. IRS et al. CV-93-405E-EJE U.S.D.C.D.I.; Public Law 94-564; Senate Report 94-1148, pg. 5967; Reorganization Plan No. 26; Public Law 102-391), and in fact was incorporated in Delaware in 1933. 

It is pointed out that all official Federal Government mail is sent postage-free because of the franking privilege, however, the IRS has to pay their own postage, which indicates that they are not a government entity. [The US Govt is but the enforcement arm for the IRS…Ed]

They are in fact a collection agency for the Federal Reserve, because they do not collect any taxes for the U.S. Treasury. All funds collected are turned over to the Federal Reserve. If you have ever sent a check to the IRS, you will find that it was endorsed over to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve, in turn, deposits the money with the International Monetary Fund, an agency of the United Nations (Black's Law Dictionary, 6th edition, pg. 816), where it is filtered down to the International Development Association (see Treasury Delegation Order No. 91), which is part of the "International Bank for Reconstruction and Development", commonly known as the World Bank. Therefore, it is now clear that the American people are unknowingly contributing to the coming World Government.

The Secretary of the Treasury is the "Governor" of the International Monetary Fund (Public Law 94-564, supra, pg. 5942; U.S. Government Manual 1990/91, pgs. 480-81; 26 U.S.C.A. 7701(a)(11); Treasury Delegation Order No. 150-10). The United States has not had a Treasury since 1921 (41 Stat. Ch. 214, pg. 654) and for all intents and purposes the U.S. Treasury is the IMF (Presidential Documents, Volume 29, No. 4, pg. 113; 22 U.S.C. 285-288).

Chief Justice John Marshall said: "The power to tax involves the power to destroy." Alan Keyes, the former ambassador to the U.N., who ran for President in 2000 said: 

"We ought to have realized that the income tax is utterly incompatible with liberty. It is actually a form of slavery. A slave is someone the fruit of whose labor is controlled by somebody else. A slave is not somebody with nothing. Rather, he has only what the master lets him have ...

Under the income tax, the government takes whatever percentage of the earner's income it wants. The income tax, therefore, represents our national surrender to the government of control over all the money we earn. There are, in principle, no restrictions to the preemptive claim the government has." 

The income tax was intended to rob the earnings of the low and middle class; or as the saying goes, "the more you make, the more they take." However, the tax didn't touch the huge fortunes of Illuminati members. The tax was an indication that the U.S. was heading for a planned war, because they couldn't go into a war without money. Since the tax provided less than 5% of total Federal revenues, increases were later made to accommodate World War I, FDR's New Deal, and World War II. In July, 1943, workers in this country were subject to a payroll withholding tax in the form of a "victory tax" that was touted as a temporary tax to boost the economy because of the War, and would later be discontinued. However, the payroll deduction remained because it forced compliance.

Now come on, pssst... admit you didn't know this.

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The American Religious Left and its Financial Sponsors

Ron Arnold looks like a very trusted source! See what your taxpayer subsidies are buying...your own national suicide perhaps?
 

Ron Arnold's Left Tracking Library

The American Religious Left
and its funders

Social Network Diagram of the American Religious Left and its Major Funders RETURN TO THE GUIDE RETURN TO THE LEFT ORGANIZATIONS INDEX RETURN TO THE LEFT TRACKING LIBRARY HOME PAGE

Soros' OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE: $2B available to Fund Anti-Americanism

From what we could see, the Open Society Institute is the largest of the Soros foundations. It is from these 'charitable' foundations subsidized by the US taxpayer , he is able to fund America's despoilage both domestically and in foreign lands. Links to other Soros foundations are at bottom of page. Find full reports for other foundations you're paying for, here. Don't you think it's long past due that all these special interests (more than 1,000,000 - churches included) are no longer subsidized by the American people?  There are thousands more agitating for the same destabilization as Soros - also with taxpayer subsidies!

IRS Rarely Audits Nonprofits for Politicking

What more evidence do the people require to conclude that "tax-exempt, ' non-profit, 'charity' orgs" are conduit mechanisms to payoff a privileged class? 

And the IRS asks for more money? When an employee's work record is poor and failing would you award him a raise, or fire him? Worse, you find out your watchman is sleeping on the job or a no-show yet billing you for a salary. The IRS does no meaningful auditing yet you're gonna award it a raise? Of course, keep in mind that in your instance you'd be using your own money not that extorted from others as is the IRS.

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By Julie Patel 22 January 2015

Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John
Koskinen explains how his agency wants to
regulate politically active nonprofits during an
interview at the agency's headquarters in
Washington, D.C. Eleanor Bell/Center for Public
Integrity

When Republicans won control of the U.S. Senate in November, they could thank dozens of conservative "dark money" nonprofit groups for spending nearly $130 million to boost their preferred candidates or bash their political enemies.

Those nonprofit groups, including many that enjoy a preferred tax status because they purport to be focused on “social welfare,” are barred from engaging in electoral politics as their primary activity.

But the Internal Revenue Service, which is charged with policing the groups, almost never audits them to see if they’re spending too much money on politics, according to new information obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

The IRS told the Center for Public Integrity that it has only begun auditing 26 organizations specifically for political activity since 2010. That represents a tiny fraction of the more than 1 million nonprofits regulated by the agency.

More than 100 nonprofit groups have directly involved themselves in elections during recent years, some spending into the tens of millions of dollars. The rest — largely charities that are generally prohibited from campaigning for politicians — are seldom monitored to ensure they follow federal law.

The situation leaves the groups largely free to operate like political committees without fear of reprisal.

Their involvement in politics, meanwhile, has accelerated since 2010, when the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision ushered in unprecedented election spending by nonprofit organizations that don’t disclose their donors.

Such groups spent more than $336 million during the 2012 cycle alone compared to about $17 million during the 2006 cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The lack of IRS oversight and enforcement stems from a confluence of factors — fewer employees are devoted to nonprofits at a time when the number of  “dark money” groups applying for tax exempt status has skyrocketed, and the agency meantime has failed to clarify the rules surrounding political activity.

Internal IRS documents also show declines in the number of IRS employees investigating nonprofit groups and the number of employees who approve organizations’ application for nonprofit status, which allows the groups to avoid paying certain taxes.

“The IRS is not doing its job,” Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., told the Center for Public Integrity. “There have been not only some obvious abuses of the tax exemption by some of these so-called social welfare groups, but I think some pretty flagrant ones.”

Help is not on the way. President Barack Obama last month signed into law a bill that chops the IRS’ annual budget by $345.6 million — reducing agency funding to 2008 levels.

It’s a decision IRS Commissioner John Koskinen says will result in hiring freezes and further job losses.

“The number of taxpayers keeps going up and the resources are down,” he said in an interview. “We are leaving billions of dollars uncollected because we do not have enough” employees.

The new information about the IRS’ internal resources comes in the agency’s response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in December 2013 by the Center for Public Integrity.

It follows an investigation the Center for Public Integrity published in July that found Congress has systematically weakened the IRS’ exempt organizations division in recent years, leading to the IRS all but quitting its regulation of politically active nonprofit groups.

The agency’s enforcement capabilities were further degraded because of political fallout from some employees’ decisions to delay approval of conservative groups’ applications for nonprofit status.

“The aftershocks from the political targeting scandal certainly don't facilitate prompt solutions,” said Mark Everson, a former IRS commissioner appointed by President George W. Bush. “I would imagine there is a real slowdown getting issues resolved because there is a tendency on the part of employees to make sure they aren't causing new problems.”

Cheryl Chasin, who worked for 32 years until 2010 in the IRS’ exempt organizations division, which oversees nonprofits, went further: “Anybody who at this point stuck their neck out [by delving into political spending] … would be slapped so hard and so fast they would bounce.”

Politically active nonprofits are simply “not afraid of the IRS or anybody else on this matter,” said Paul Streckfus, a former exempt organizations division employee who now edits a trade journal focusing on nonprofits. “Anything goes as far as spending” by these groups.

Politically active nonprofits include 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups, 501(c)(5) labor unions and 501(c)(6) trade groups.

It’s not that investigators can’t look at the issue: Auditors are empowered to probe groups for suspected political transgressions during the course of other audits, an agency spokesman said. The number of those audits, however, isn’t tracked.

The number of employees responsible for investigating nonprofits in the IRS exempt organizations division has dropped 9 percent from fiscal year 2010 through fiscal year 2013 — from 538 to 489.

There has also been a 16 percent decline in “determinations” employees — workers who process applications for nonprofit status. Their numbers fell from 297 in fiscal year 2009 to 248 in fiscal year 2013.

Meanwhile, applications for “social welfare” nonprofit status — the status obtained by many of the nation’s most politically active groups — increased by more than 17 percent, from 1,922 in fiscal year 2009 to 2,253 in fiscal year 2013.

The agency as a whole lost 13,000 employees in the past four years and has dealt with hefty budget cuts in recent years, and the exempt organizations division hasn’t been spared — even as its leaders “review how to most effectively use its staff,” said Bruce I. Friedland, an IRS spokesman.

Friedland also noted that the IRS has attempted to reduce the backlog of tax-exemption applications by, among other things, bringing in employees from another division to help.

A roster provided by the IRS of tax exempt and government entities division employees from 2001 to 2013 indicates support services for workers has also taken a blow.

For example, the 20 “employee development” positions in 2001 fell to three in 2013, plus four human resources positions.

Several IRS employees said the change was likely part of the overall decrease in training they encountered over the years. This, in turn, contributed to the uncertainty about how to handle applications for nonprofit status by a new wave of political groups.

“Practitioners [such as nonprofit tax attorneys] are saying they’re seeing a reduction in the quality of the work coming out of the IRS. A lot can be traced to that training budget being slashed,” said Streckfus, who worked for the IRS for six years during the 1970s.
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Why All Nonprofits Should Lose Their Tax-Exemption

People have been pounding the drums for years for congress to abolish these privileged tax avoidance schemes! Abolishing the IRS entirely may have to wait for a time, but eliminating IRS tax sheltering schemes for corporations,  political parties, academics, millionaires, subversives, foreign agents, and yes even churches, is needed now! Friends, these are not charities as we are told, they are un-Constitutional, parasitic and feed from the souls who toil for them --- us.

Posted on April 4, 2014 by The PROGRESSIVE View - Eric Zuesse
 

via  Washington's Blog

Even the “nonprofit” Harvard University, with the world’s largest academic endowment fund, refuses to do its duty to the public and to their own students, and to divest itself from the companies that are destroying our planet — companies that are destroying the biosphere that their students and everyone else will inherit. What, then, does their “nonprofit” status really amount to, but a sham to shift their own tax-burden onto everybody else — a tax-shifting scheme? If they are so obsessed with profit that they don’t even care about the planet, and their students’ future, then they are really just an outrage, not at all better than the companies they invest in that are destroying our planet — and they should therefore be stripped of their “nonprofit” status, and of the privileges that it bestows upon them at everyone else’s expense. They are just a tax-shifting racket, and should be recognized as such.

Thus, I am here publicly urging Congress to strip of “nonprofit” status all organizations that, like Harvard, continue to invest in fossil-fuels-exploration and development corporations, such as Exxon Mobil, and Peabody Coal. Undiscovered oil, gas, and especially coal, must remain undiscovered; and these fuels will inevitably soon be simply abandoned anyway, because of their long-term harms. Even if they stop too late, they will stop; they will be forced to, but the question is: How soon? Will it be soon enough?

A January 2013 report to institutional investors by the world’s largest bank, HSBC, was titled “Oil and Carbon Revisited: Value at Risk from ‘Unburnable’ Reserves,” and it noted, in its front-page summary, under the heading of “Unburnable Reserves,” that, “The IEA’s World Energy Outlook (2012 edition) estimated that in order to have a 50% chance of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2ºC [i.e., the amount of heating above which runaway heating would be uncontrollable], only a third of current fossil fuel reserves can be burned before 2050. The balance could be regarded as ‘unburnable’.”

The rest — all of the remaining two-thirds — must stay in the ground, never be burned. That one-third will be reduced to even less if the most global-warming-worst fuels, such as coal, tar-sands oil, and petroleum cokes, are to be part of the mix that will be burned. If any of those super-dirty ones are burned, then the cleaner carbon-based fuels such as regular oils will practically not be able to be burned at all if the world is still to be able to avoid climate-catastrophe.

The amount of all fossil-fuels that will be able to be burned if the world is to have an 80% chance of avoiding uncontrollable climate-catastrophe is only 20%; and that percentage, too, will be even less if the dirtiest carbon-fuels are to be included in the mix.

What this means is that the investors in the dirtiest fuel-sources, such as the Koch brothers, who own more than half of Alberta Canada’s tar sands, will be (and indeed are) fighting the hardest to persuade the public to simply ignore global warming.

The propaganda from the fossil-fuels corporations, and especially from the Koch brothers and the rest of the dirtiest fossil-fuels-producing firms, causes to remain legal the continued exploration to discover yet more oil, gas, and coal, to burn beyond the point-of-no-return for our planet, even though no more such fuels should be discovered and added to the already-existing stockpiles (since much of it will have to remain in the ground). Our society is just too corrupt for it to be illegal yet. It’s like slave-trading was, and like Apartheid in South Africa was, before public pressure caused laws to change and those activities to stop (or at least to become outlawed). But “nonprofits” that invest in such things are adding insults to the already incalculable injuries that those firms cause. This is essentially a publicly subsidized rape of our planet; and it is even more unacceptable, and must therefore be stopped — which Congress can do, and here is how:

The 17 February 2014 issue of the Nation has an article by James Lawrence Powell on “Harvard and Brown Fail on Climate.” Powell, now retired, himself had a storied career, which makes him an ideal authority on this sort of thing. He was the president of Oberlin College, of Franklin and Marshall College, of Reed College, of the Franklin Institute Science Museum, and of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History; and, so, he knows something about nonprofit educational organizations, such as Harvard. He also has an MIT Ph.D. in Geology; and, so, he also knows something about science concerning our planet. Furthermore, as wikipedia’s article about him says, “In 2012, Powell conducted a survey of scientific papers regarding the topic of anthropogenic global warming by searching Web of Science for scientific papers published from 1991 to 2012. He identified 13,950 papers, but only 24 argued that humans were not the primary cause of global warming. He updated his survey in 2014 to include studies published from November 12, 2012 to December 21, 2013, and identified only one study published during this time which argued that global warming was not caused by human activity.” So, he knows the refereed scientific literature on climate change as well as just about anyone does.

That article from him in the Nation says:

“Today, university presidents, and the institutions they lead, confront a moral choice over a crisis that threatens human health and society on a far greater scale than either tobacco or apartheid: climate change. As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in Field Notes From a Catastrophe, ‘It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.’ In the last few years, students have begun urging their colleges and universities to divest from fossil fuel companies (FFCs), whose products are driving climate change. Two of the first university presidents to respond, [were] Drew Gilpin Faust of Harvard [http://www.harvard.edu/president/fossil-fuels 3 Oct. 2013 had him saying, 'I do not believe, nor do my colleagues on the Corporation, that university divestment from the fossil fuel industry is warranted or wise. Harvard is an academic institution. It exists to serve an academic mission — to carry out the best possible programs of education and research.'] and Christina Paxson of Brown [http://brown.edu/about/administration/president/2013-10-27-coal-divestment-update 27 Oct. had her saying, 'The serious, thoughtful and robust discussion in the Corporation covered the full range of perspectives. The conclusion of this discussion is that Brown will not divest from coal.']”

So: those “nonprofit” institutions obviously would rather put the profits of oil, gas, and coal companies (and their own splendid paychecks derived therefrom), above their responsibilities to the public, or even above the lives that their students will be experiencing in a world of runaway, out-of-control, heating.

Why should all the rest of us continue to pay their taxes?

Are not the stakes now too high for their scam of us to be allowed to continue any further?

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