WASHINGTON DC (October 10, 2019) — Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles "Chuck" Grassley today cautioned the Internal Revenue Service against indulging Democrats’ political demands to investigate the National Rifle Association. Such ideological weaponizing of the agency would harm the public trust and repeat the mistakes of the Obama Administration.
In a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, Grassley wrote that a recent Finance Committee Minority staff report of NRA activities in 2015 provided no basis for an audit of the organization’s tax-exempt status. The committee’s Majority staff evaluated the same information and found no wrongdoing that would jeopardize the NRA’s tax-exempt status.
“The facts investigated by the Minority in the Finance Committee regarding the NRA and detailed in its report do not lend themselves to serious questions about whether the NRA has remained faithful to its non-profit purpose in recent years,” Sen Grassley wrote.
“Indeed, rather than present a careful and serious analysis, the Minority staff report offers incendiary conclusions unsupported by paragraphs full of belabored references to behavior that ‘raises serious’ but undefined ‘concerns.’”
Sen Grassley warned that launching an audit based on politics and unsupported by facts to justify such a review would risk public trust necessary for the agency to fully execute its revenue collection and tax-enforcement mission.
“It is critical for the administration of our tax system that the IRS remain ideologically neutral when it comes to enforcing the tax code, and it is just as critical that taxpayers all throughout the United States know and believe this to be true. This decade has already seen the IRS involved in enough controversy around politically-motived tax enforcement, and the IRS should strive mightily to avoid such episodes in the future,” Sen Grassley continued.
Full text of Sen Grassley’s letter.
