August 23, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Sen. Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who took over the reins of the Senate Finance Committee in January, said he does not give high priority to cracking down on charitable abuses or imposing new regulations on nonprofit groups.
“That’s not at the top of my list,” he said in an interview with The Chronicle.
Mr. Baucus also said he favored extending a law that allows people to give money from their individual retirement accounts to charity without paying any taxes. That law is set to expire at the end of this year.
But he is not sure that expanding the provision to allow more types of groups to accept such gifts and increasing the amount donors can give — ideas advocated by nonprofit and foundation leaders — is politically feasible given Congress’s vow to rein in the budget deficit.
“I’d like to extend it as far into the future as we can, but recognizing the limitations that we have,” he said.
Senator Baucus, as chairman of the Senate committee that regulates tax-exempt organizations, said that he will have different priorities than his predecessor, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa.
“Senator Grassley and I work very closely together,” he said. “It’s a relationship that we both treasure and we agree far more than we don’t on policy,” he said. “But I also have to look at the calendar.”
Mr. Baucus expressed doubts about a proposal, issued in July by Mr. Grassley’s aides, to require nonprofit hospitals to spend at least 5 percent of their annual budgets on charity care or lose their tax-exempt status.
The proposal aims to ensure that the hospitals do more to serve the uninsured and justify the estimated $40-billion the federal government loses each year in taxes.
But Mr. Baucus said he questions a solution that would apply an “across-the-board rule that applies to all nonprofit hospitals in all part of the country.”
