Tax Agency Must Pay Christian Coalition $59,000

BY GRANT WILLIAMS

A federal court has ordered the Internal Revenue Service to pay Christian Coalition International $58,941 to cover the advocacy organization’s legal and administrative fees that the group incurred during the years it spent fighting the government for tax-exempt status.

Last year, reversing its earlier position, the I.R.S. conceded in federal court that the Christian Coalition was qualified as a tax-exempt organization — for just one year, in 1990 — and was refunding the group’s taxes of $169.26 for that period. The Christian Coalition had argued for years that it deserved a permanent exemption, and had charged that the government’s decision to deny tax-exempt status was improper, unconstitutional, and arbitrary because the service had granted exemption to what it called liberal groups that engaged in similar kinds of activities.

The U. S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the Christian Coalition had in fact “prevailed” in the litigation — because it gained an exemption for one year — and that the I.R.S. owed the organization for reasonable legal fees that it incurred over the several years of the battle, not just for expenses covering that one year.