IRS Complaint Filed Against Jeb Bush's Ed Reform Foundation
| Tue Oct. 15, 2013 3:05 PM PDT
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| Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush speaking at CPAC 2013 |
Jeb Bush has long been on the short-list of potential Republican presidential candidates. He was a popular Spanish-speaking governor of a big swing state, Florida, and since leaving office he has focused on education reform through his Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE). The foundation has provided a platform for working on a bipartisan public policy front—and access to potential donors among big companies (including thoseowned by Fox News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch) trying to privatize public schools and tap into billions of tax dollars. (See this Mother Jones story for a closer look at the way Bush has used his foundation to break down barriers to the growth of troubled online charter schools.)
This week, as Bush is back in the limelight in Boston kicking off his foundation's annualeducation reform summit, a New Mexico advocacy group, ProgressNowNM, has filed a complaint with the IRS alleging that Bush's foundation has failed to publicly disclose on its 990 tax forms thousands of dollars it paid to bring public school superintendents, education officials and lawmakers to foundation events where they had private "VIP" meetings with the foundation's for-profit sponsors. Nonprofits are required to disclose payments for public officials' travel and entertainment if it exceeds $1,000. Public records unearthed by the New Mexico group show payments for travel exceeding that amount for several state education officials whose travel wasn't reported on FEE's 990 form.
The complaint alleges that Bush's foundation disguised travel payments for officials as
