Deadbeat politicos outrun federal enforcers
Go ahead: Break election laws and violate tax rules, inviting federal fines you never pay.
You might just end up like civil rights leader Al Sharpton, who now hosts MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation,” a nightly news show that serves as a de facto soapbox for his liberal political views.
On the program, Sharpton regularly defends the IRS, a division of the U.S. Treasury Department, against conservatives’ criticism that the agency gave special scrutiny to right-leaning nonprofit groups,
“There was no conspiracy for the IRS to target conservatives. So why are some Republicans so obsessed about all of them?” Sharpton shouted during a show last February.
What Sharpton doesn’t tell viewers is that his 2004 presidential committee owes the U.S. Treasury $19,500 a decade after being caught accepting illegal campaign contributions, according to federal records. It also owes the Federal Election Commission several thousand dollars in unpaid fines, even after paying off a separate $208,000 penalty in 2009 for several campaign violations.
Sharpton’s saga, while extreme, is hardly unique.
Dozens of political committees together owe government agencies — and therefore, taxpayers — more than $1 million in outstanding penalties, back taxes and other liabilities, a Center for Public Integrity analysis of federal records shows. Some debts are more than 15 years old.
The government’s anemic campaign law enforcement efforts and plodding debt collections process are largely to blame for this growing cache of overdue debt, owed by Democrats and Republicans alike. Overburdened regulators spend little time chasing offenders, especially political committees that fade into insolvency and irrelevancy after violating the law.
Consider the FEC: Tasked by law with fining political committees that break election laws, the agency itself has no real power to make them pay.
And the way the laws are written, the politicians themselves, including also-ran presidential candidates Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain and Gary Bauer, aren’t personally responsible for the debts their campaign committees have incurred.
Related: Unpaid FEC fines
There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.
This story is part of Consider the Source. Seeking to ‘out’ shadowy political organizations flourishing in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Click here to read more stories in this investigation.
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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
