Tuesday, July 17, 2018

U.S. Treasury Restricts Donor Disclosure Requirement for Some Nonprofit Groups - WSJ

U.S. Treasury Restricts Donor Disclosure Requirement for Some Nonprofit Groups - WSJ

U.S. Treasury Restricts Donor Disclosure Requirement for Some Nonprofit Groups
Social welfare groups, trade associations won’t have to list donors, department says


WASHINGTON—The Treasury Department will allow some nonprofit groups to provide less information about donors on their tax forms in a win for conservative organizations engaged in politics.
Until now, nonprofit groups, including charities and trade associations, had to list contributors who give at least $5,000 on what is known as Schedule B. The IRS received the complete version, and the groups publicly released redacted forms without identifying information about donors.

Under the change announced late Monday, charities and political groups still must provide the names and addresses of donors, but other nonprofits don’t. Organizations that no longer need to provide the information include social welfare organizations, which can engage in politics and don’t have to disclose their donors to the Federal Election Commission. Social welfare groups have been active across the political spectrum, but conservative ones have been particularly involved in politics.
Some of the largest groups affected include an arm of the National Rifle Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity, a group tied to billionaires Charles and David Koch.

“Americans shouldn’t be required to send the IRS information that it doesn’t need to effectively enforce our tax laws, and the IRS simply does not need tax returns with donor names and addresses to do its job in this area,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. “This change will in no way limit transparency. The same information about tax-exempt organizations that was previously available to the public will continue to be available, while private taxpayer information will be better protected.”
According to the Trump administration, the IRS didn’t make systematic use of the information. But the previously available redacted forms did often reveal useful information, such as whether a particular group is supported by just one or two major donors. Under Monday’s change, that information would presumably still be available publicly. It appears that the rules would require the new version submitted to IRS to match the redacted version released under the old rules.
For the past few years, Republicans have been examining the Schedule B requirements, questioning how useful the information is to the IRS and arguing that donors could face harassment if the information is inadvertently released.
In 2016, the House passed a bill to eliminate the requirement, but the Obama administration opposed it and it didn’t become law. The IRS has previously considered scaling back the requirement but hadn’t done so until Monday. The donor-disclosure rules for charities and political groups are contained in statutes and can’t be changed by the administration.
“The IRS’s decision is a move in the right direction to end activist regulators’ culture of intimidation to silence political speech,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) “More and more states were using these documents to chill political discourse, rather than encourage it.”

Democrats blasted the decision and warned that the IRS would have one less tool to figure out whether groups are complying with the law. Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) said he will vote against President Donald Trump’s pick to run the IRS unless he promises to reverse the move.
“President Trump’s late-night giveaway to shady donors and interest groups makes dark Continue reading: U.S. Treasury Restricts Donor Disclosure Requirement for Some Nonprofit Groups - WSJ

He has quite the résumé — just not for the powerful schools job he has won - The Washington Post

He has quite the résumé — just not for the powerful schools job he has won - The Washington Post

He has quite the résumé — just not for the powerful schools job he has won




He’s got quite the résumé.
Austin Beutner, the new superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, has been, among other things:
— Clinton administration appointee assigned with helping Russia transform from a centralized to free-market economy
— Successful investment banker
— First deputy mayor of Los Angeles, overseeing 12 city agencies
— Publisher and chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune
— Major philanthropist
Now he is chief of the second-largest school district in the country. Experience in the classroom? Zilch.  Operational experience in education systems? Nada.

The L.A. school board made its choice — in relative secrecy and without what some critics said was sufficient vetting — believing that educational experience isn’t required to fix problems that have festered for decades and that seem intractable. Educators have been in charge in the past, after all, and they didn’t fix the problems, so why not try a new approach?
Well, that would be a reasonable question if it hadn’t been tried before and failed. Numerous districts — either schools boards or mayors with power to make the decision — have tapped business executives, or retired generals, or, in New York’s case, a former federal prosecutor (Joel Klein) to run schools. (Can you think of another profession in which a leader would be selected with no internal experience, except, possibly, politics?) If you don’t remember ever hearing of a brilliant turnaround of a district, that’s because there wasn’t one.
Why? Because no matter who has been in charge, the keys of education restructuring — standardized test-based accountability and school choice — aren’t designed to fundamentally address the drastic problems facing many school systems. Testing is based on a notion that it’s an effective evaluation tool for high-stakes decisions — but assessment experts say it isn’t. School choice — in the form of charter schools and voucherlike programs — has not proved to be a systematic solution.
Charter schools — publicly funded but privately operated, often by private companies — are a good example of the problems school choice has created in the state. California has more than 1,200 charter schools enrolling some 630,000 students — about 10 percent of students in the state — and L.A. Unified has the most.




Charters have been a controversial topic in Los Angeles ever since a plan by housing and insurance Continue reading: He has quite the résumé — just not for the powerful schools job he has won - The Washington Post