March 23, 2000 | Read Time: 1 minute
Independent Sector, a national coalition of charities and grant makers, is asking Congress to reject several recommendations made by the Joint Committee on Taxation that would require non-profit organizations to make public new information about their operations. Some of the ideas from the committee, which scrutinizes tax matters for the House and Senate, would “add substantial burdens, chill non-profit participation in the policy-making process, and yield little useful information,” Independent Sector said.
The joint committee recently proposed that Congress require, among other things, that many non-profit groups provide additional information to the Internal Revenue Service and to the public about their efforts to influence government officials (The Chronicle, March 9). Such information would include a detailed description on federal informational tax returns of the legislation that charities had sought to influence through lobbying campaigns.
In comments submitted to the House Ways and Means Committee, which asked for public reaction, Independent Sector said that many charities already must follow a variety of federal and state laws on lobbying.
“Unfortunately, many charities read into these complex and stringent requirements a signal that participation in the legislative process is a suspect activity that they undertake at their peril,” Independent Sector said. “The substantial complexity of the existing rules already has a profound chilling effect. The Joint Tax Committee recommendations would only exacerbate this serious problem.”
Still, Independent Sector said that it generally favored most of the ideas for disclosure of information about charities that were proposed by the joint committee, especially one that the I.R.S. revise the federal informational tax return to ensure that the document provides relevant and comprehensible information to the public and government.
The text of Independent Sector’s remarks to Congress may be found on its Web site at http://www.independentsector.org.
