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    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    IRS official Lerner speedily approved exemption for Obama brother’s ‘charity’

    IRS official Lerner speedily approved exemption for Obama brother’s ‘charity’

    05/14/2013
    Charles C. Johnson


    Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official at the center of the decision to target tea party groups for burdensome tax scrutiny, signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a shady charity headed by the president’s half-brother that operated illegally for years.

    According to the organization’s filings, Lerner approved the foundation’s tax status within a month of filing, an unprecedented timeline that stands in stark contrast to conservative organizations that have been waiting for more than three years, in some cases, for approval.
    Lerner also appears to have broken with the norms of tax-exemption approval by granting retroactive tax-exempt status to Malik Obama’s organization.

    The National Legal and Policy Center filed an official complaint with the IRS in May 2011 asking why the foundation was being allowed to solicit tax-deductible contributions when it had not even applied for an IRS determination. In a New York Post article dated May 8, 2011, an officer of the foundation admitted, “We haven’t been able to find someone with the expertise” to apply for tax-exempt status.
    Nevertheless, a month later, the Barack H. Obama Foundation had flown through the grueling application process. Lerner granted the organization a 501(c) determination and even gave it a retroactive tax exemption dating back to December 2008.

    The group’s available paperwork suggests an extremely hurried application and approval process. For example, the group’s 990 filings for 2008 and 2009 were submitted to the IRS on May 30, 2011, and its 2010 filing was submitted on May 23, 2011.

    Lerner signed the group’s approval [pdf] on June 26, 2011.

    It is illegal to operate for longer than 27 months without an IRS determination and solicit tax-deductible contributions.

    The ostensibly Arlington, Va.-based charity was not even registered in Virginia despite the foundation’s website including a donation button that claimed tax-exempt status.

    Its president and founder, Abon’go “Roy’ Malik Obama, is Barack Obama’s half-brother and was the best man at his wedding, but he has a checkered past. In addition to running his charity, Malik Obama ran unsuccessfully to be the governor of Siaya County in Kenya. He was accused of being a wife beater and seducing the newest of his twelve wives while she was a 17-year-old school girl.
    Sensing something wrong when he and a group of Missouri State students visited Kenya in 2009, Ken Rutherford, winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on banning landmines, determined that Malik Obama was an “operator” and elected to give a donation of 400 pounds of medical supplies to a local clinic instead.

    “We didn’t know what he was going to do with them,” Rutherford told the New York Post in 2011.

    It is also not clear what the Barack H. Obama Foundation actually does. Its website claims the organization has built a madrassa and was building a imam’s house but there is no other evidence that the nonprofit was actually helping poor Kenyan children.

    “The Obama Foundation raised money on its web page by falsely claiming to be a tax deductible. This bogus charity run by Malik had not even applied and yet subsequently got retroactive tax-deductible status,” Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, told The Daily Caller. Boehm described Malik Obama’s attempt to raise money as constituting “common law fraud and potentially even federal mail fraud.”

    Boehm doubted that the charity is doing what it says it’s doing and wondered why the charity was given tax-exempt status so quickly after the evidence of wrongdoing came to light.

    “How do you get retroactive tax-exempt status when you haven’t even applied to get it in the first place?” Boehm said.

    Lerner continues to draw fire for her handling of the IRS targeting of conservative and citizen groups, but her colleagues have started to defend her, alleging that she behaves “apolitically.”

    Larry Noble, who served as general counsel at the FEC from 1987 to 2000, hired and promoted Lerner. “I worked with Lois for a number of years and she is really one of the more apolitical people I’ve met,” Noble told The Daily Beast. “That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have political views, but she really focuses on the job and what the rules are. She doesn’t have an agenda.”

    Lerner could not be reached for comment. Calls to the Barack H. Obama Foundation went directly to the organization’s voicemail and were not returned

    Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/14/ir...#ixzz2TL78z0Mk

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    Senior Member oldguy's Avatar
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    Imagine this group (IRS) having access to your medical records under Obama care, frightening to say the least.
    I'm old with many opinions few solutions.

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    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    Embattled IRS official Lois Lerner’s husband’s law firm has strong Obama connections

    05/16/2013
    Patrick Howley
    Investigative Reporter

    The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official who apologized for targeting conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny is married to an attorney whose firm hosted a voter registration organizing event for the 2012 Obama re-election campaign, praised President Obama’s policy work, and had one of its partners appointed by Obama to a key ambassadorship.

    IRS Exempt Organizations Division director Lois G. Lerner, who has been described as “apolitical” in mainstream press coverage of the IRS scandal, is married to tax attorney Michael R. Miles, a partner at the law firm Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. The firm is based in Atlanta but has a number of offices including in Washington, D.C., where Miles works.

    The 400-attorney firm hosted an organizing meeting at its Atlanta office for people interested in helping with voter registration for the Obama re-election campaign.

    This is not the first of Lerner’s connections to the president to surface. Earlier this week The Daily Caller reported that Lerner personally signed the tax-exemption approval for a shady charity run by Obama’s half-brother, after an inexplicably brief one-month application process. (Related: Lois Lerner approved exemption for Obama brother’s ‘charity’)

    “Come learn more about how you can create, organize, and host a voter registration event here in Atlanta in the coming weeks. We will be meeting at at 7:30pm at 999 Peachtree St. NE, in the law offices of Sutherland, Asbill, and Brennan,” read an event posting on my.barackobama.com.

    Longtime Sutherland partner David Adelman, the former Democratic minority whip of the Georgia state senate, serves as ambassador to the Republic of Singapore in the Obama administration.

    “Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP announces that its partner and Georgia State Sen. David I. Adelman, has been confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Singapore. President Obama nominated Sen. Adelman on November 20, 2009,” according to a Sutherland press release dated March 19, 2010.

    “Sutherland has a great tradition of excellence. It has been a privilege to be a part of such a fine firm,” Adelman said at the time of his confirmation, according to the Sutherland press release.

    “I am humbled by the confidence President Obama and Secretary Clinton have in me, and I look forward to building on the strong U.S.-Singapore relationship,” said Adelman, who joined Sutherland in 1993 and spent his entire career in private practice with the firm.
    Sutherland heaped praised on Obama’s work in the U.S. Senate on legal issues pertaining to employee misclassification, which Sutherland works intensely enough on to have launched the website workerclassification.com.

    “The subject of worker classification is likely to take on increased importance in light of the recent election of Barack Obama as President. While in the Senate, President Obama showed an interest in strengthening workers’ rights, particularly with respect to whether they should be classified as employees,” according to a Sutherland press release dated April 28, 2009.

    “Along with others, he introduced the Independent Contractor Proper Classification Act of 2007. This legislation sought to give regulatory authority to the IRS to establish standards for properly classifying workers and to repeal the Section 530 safe harbor provisions that currently allow employers to rely on industry practice or professional advice as a reasonable basis for classifying workers. Also as a senator, President Obama, along with others, introduced the Employee Misclassification Prevention Act on September 29, 2008, which sought ‘to provide a special penalty for employers who misclassify employees as nonemployees,” according to the Sutherland press release.

    Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/16/em...#ixzz2TSZyeQnC

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    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    IRS exec got $42k in bonuses in three years

    May 15, 2013 | 4:19 pm
    Mark Tapscott


    Executive Editor
    The Washington Examiner

    Lois Lerner, the senior executive in charge of the IRS tax exemption department and the federal employee at the center of the exploding scandal over the IRS targeting of conservative, evangelical and pro-Israel non-profits, was given $42,531 in bonuses
    between 2009 and 2011. (Thinkstock)

    Lois Lerner, the senior executive in charge of the IRS tax exemption department and the federal employee at the center of the exploding scandal over the IRS targeting of conservative, evangelical and pro-Israel non-profits, was given $42,531 in bonuses between 2009 and 2011.

    That figure was included in data provided by the IRS in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Washington Examiner. Lerner is director of the IRS exempt organizations division, which processes and approves or denies applications from groups seeking tax-exempt status.

    Lerner received $17,220 for 2010, $14,691 for 2011 and $10,620 for 2012, the most recent year for which the IRS said data was available.
    Her annual salary in 2009 and 2010 was $172,200, and $177,000 in 2011 and 2012. With the bonuses, Lerner was paid a total of $740,931 for the four-year period.

    Lerner admitted last week that her agency had singled out conservative groups with words like "Tea Party" and "Patriot" in their names. Being singled out reportedly delayed resolution of their application for many months for most of the groups, while applications from liberals groups were typically processed in only a month or two.
    Kelly Cohen, a member of The Washington Examiner's Watchdog investigative reporting team, contributed to this report.
    Mark Tapscott is executive editor of The Washington Examiner.


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