June 08, 2011

IRS strips tax-exempt status for 275K groups

By Michael Winter, USA TODAY
Updated 2h 41m ago

The IRS has automatically revoked the tax-exempt status of 275,000 organizations that did not file required annual reports for the past three years, the Associated Press reports.

The IRS believes that most are defunct, but functioning groups were told how to seek reinstatement (pdf).

For past donors to the affected groups, the revocations "should have little, if any, impact on donors who previously made deductible contributions to auto-revoked organizations because donations made prior to the publication of an organization's name on the list remain tax-deductible," the IRS said in a news release.

The IRS said it will post the names of the revoked groups on its website.

As of last year there were nearly 2 million tax-exempt organizations. About 1.3 million were religious and charitable groups.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... k-groups/1