by Emma Baccellieri
Democratic operative David Brock now runs CREW, the organization that has filed suit against 10 dark money groups. (AP Photo/Danny Johnston)
Even with a tax status that says "social welfare group," a nonprofit organization's spending record can still reveal plenty of political activity.
Sometimes too much. Ten politically active nonprofits are the subject of new civil complaints filed with the IRS by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning watchdog group based in D.C. and run by Hillary Clinton ally David Brock. All 10 are 501(c)(4) organizations, a tax designation for "social welfare" nonprofits that aren't required to disclose their donors. And all 10, according to the complaints, violated rules that bar (c)(4) groups from devoting more than 50 percent of their resources to political activity.
Nine of the 10 groups used their political spending to support Republican candidates in races for governorships, Senate seats and other offices. CREW also filed criminal complaints accusing six of the 10, calling on the FBI and Department of Justice to investigate whether the groups lied to the IRS.
Uncovering this duplicitous behavior can be difficult, noted Paul S. Ryan, deputy executive director of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. Nonprofits are not required to file their Form 990s -- their tax paperwork -- until long after the spending in question has occurred. And with lax enforcement by the government and hazy definitions in the law, many groups appear to push the envelope when it comes to trying to influence elections.
"The whole reason we've seen an explosion of use and abuse of 501(c)(4) organizations is that they don't have to disclose where they're getting their money," Ryan said. "We're not seeing effective enforcement, so it's tough to know how much illegal activity's going on. But the sense is that there's a lot, and that the amount of illegal activity by 501(c)(4)s has been growing."
In December, OpenSecrets Blog analyzed the political activity of 24 nonprofit groups that exceeded this 50 percent spending limit between 2008 and 2013. The 10 nonprofits cited by CREW Wednesday appear to have engaged in many of the same spending practices as the groups we examined then.
Some have used "attributable spending," which involves making grants to other nonprofits that then use the money for political activity. Many have sponsored "issue ads" that they classify as educational rather than political by virtue of the fact that they do not directly call on viewers to vote for a specific candidate -- though they often call out candidates by name and reference their track record on various subjects.
Most of the 10 groups are registered in states that haven't been the focus of their spending. For instance, the Legacy Foundation Action Fund is a 501(c)(4) based in Iowa that concentrated its spending on the Nebraska Senate race, benefiting Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), and the Arizona gubernatorial race. The group spent more than $700,000 on these races, or 69 percent of its total spending. Similarly, the American Dream Initiative is based in Virginia, but the bulk of its outlays -- more than $500,000, or 83 percent of its total spent -- went to the Texas gubernatorial race. The name of the group's executive director might ring a bell: Dan Backer, the campaign finance lawyer behind the 2014 McCutcheon v. FEC Supreme Court decision.
Another of the 501(c)(4) organizations spending all of its political money out of state is the Jobs and Progress Fund, which is based in Ohio. It admitted giving nearly $1.8 million (or 56 percent of its total spending) to super PACs supporting Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) in his 2014 race. Jobs and Progress Fund has been linked to another one of the nonprofits listed in the complaints, the Mid America Fund, an Ohio group whose spending in the 2014 Illinois governor's race was the subject of an OpenSecrets Blog report last February. And there's a Jobs and Progress fund link to yet another of the nonprofits cited in the complaints: James Nathanson, one of the founding members of Jobs and Progress, is currently the executive director of Freedom Vote, which devoted nearly 61 percent of its spending to backing Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) in his 2014 primary, CREW alleges. Freedom Vote is notable not just for where its money went, but also where it came from. The group received contributions from some of the country's largest politically active conservative nonprofits, including Crossroads GPS and American Action Network.