The Christian non-profits Focus on the Family and the legal defense group Liberty Counsel have now declared themselves churches to avoid revealing how much money they have.
Every non-profit organization in the country has to file a 990 report with the IRS explaining (among other things) how much money they took in, how it was spent, and how much their top staffers made in salaries. It’s a public document, too, a way to keep tabs on whether a non-profit really is living up to its mission. There’s an exception to the Form 990, though. Religious institutions, despite being non-profits and not having to pay taxes, do not have to fill out the form or make it public.
That shouldn’t matter when we’re talking about Christian non-profits like Focus on the Family or the legal defense group Liberty Counsel. They’re not churches. They’re regular non-profits. In the view of the IRS, they’re no different from Planned Parenthood. All of them have to file the 990s each year.
But Right Wing Watch’s Miranda Blue reports that those two Christian groups in particular have declared themselves churches, sparing them from the public scrutiny that would’ve come had they filed a regular 990.
Gail Harmon, an attorney who has advised nonprofits on tax law for more than 30 years, said that she had never before seen a nonprofit organization declare itself a church. “I just found it shocking,” she said.
“There’s nothing about them that meets the traditional definition of what a church is,” she said. “They don’t have a congregation, they don’t have the rites of various parts of a person’s life. There’s a whole system for what a church is.”
Read the full story at the Friendly Atheist Blog
