Friday, May 17, 2013

Attorney: “Every single application of a Muslim nonprofit has flown through the IRS, with less scrutiny”

creeping 
 
Including terror-linked CAIR (see links below). via ILLUME reporter, a corporate and tax attorney, Maryam Khan Ansari. 

Do Muslim Nonprofits Have it Easier Than Tea Party Groups?
Has the Internal Revenue Service been tacitly cracking down on the Tea Party? Quite possibly, according to CNN, in what’s being called “The IRS Tea-Party Scandal.”

In fact, it may be easier to become a Muslim nonprofit these days than it would be to become a Tea Party affiliated nonprofit.

Having spent most of my legal career working with tax exempt entities, the IRS scrutiny on the Tea Party isn’t news to me. In my days at large law firms, I handled a portfolio of nonprofit Tea Party organizations and saw firsthand how the IRS treated them when it came to granting exemptions.


In many cases, the organizations fight tooth-and-nail to get through IRS scrutiny, often facing pages of questions from the IRS on their activities.
And she said and did nothing. If it were a Muslim group would she remain silent?
On the flip side, I’ve worked with numerous Muslim organizations as well. And every single application of a Muslim nonprofit has gone through the IRS, with less scrutiny. Of course, they still did get scrutiny– after all, Islamophobia is still pretty rampant everywhere and it’s inaccurate to say that they got a free pass. But truth be told, they never got a 10-page questionnaire on each and every one of their grantees.

What does this say about the way that the IRS is handling applications from Muslim nonprofits? For one, in the application phase, Muslim nonprofits seem to have an upper hand over Tea Party groups. Of course, the Muslim groups face their struggles post-determination, when they’re suddenly placed under investigation. And the IRS isn’t the agency that tends to target Muslim nonprofits, even though the Treasury has a list of “scary Muslims” (ever heard of the OFAC list?).  It’s usually  the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security who run Muslim nonprofits to the ground and put their founders in jail. But going back to the IRS Tea Party scandal, the IRS certainly makes it hard for Tea Party groups to make it through the door.
For now, nonprofits should learn from this debacle and be very careful when chosing a name. Their name could lead to their application falling into a “special” pile.
That’s the advice you get from a lawyer who whines about Islamophobia and Treasury/FBI scrutiny of Islamic charities – many shut down or convicted for funding jihadists?
The IRS also granted Hamas-linked CAIR tax-exempt status once again despite their foreign-funding and numerous failures to report.
  1. Hamas-linked CAIR loses IRS tax deductible status

  2. Why is CAIR withholding tax records from the IRS?

  3. Muslim group won’t disclose tax information as required by law

  4. U.S. Congressman Asks IRS To Investigate CAIR

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