Keep Charitable Oversight in the IRS

Authors

Philip Hackney, University of Pittsburgh School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

Critics are increasingly calling for Congress to remove charity regulation from the IRS. The critics are wrong. Congress should maintain charity regulation in the IRS. What is at stake is balancing power between the state, charity as civil society, and the economic order. In a well-balanced democracy, civil society maintains its independence from the state and the economic order. Removing charitable jurisdiction from the IRS would blind the IRS to dollars placed in the charitable sector increasing tax and political shelters and wealthy dominance of charities as civil society. A new agency without understanding of, or jurisdiction over, tax cannot act as the bulwark as can the IRS. The critics are right that both the states and the IRS are failing at charitable regulation. Ideally, Congress would allocate sufficient resources to the IRS. However, the long history of charity regulation shows that we are unwilling to allocate the resources to this endeavor. This in fact is a flaw of the proposals for a quasi-federal charitable regulatory agency. These proposals will not generate new funds but will instead spread scarce resources even thinner. Instead, Congress should acknowledge its unwillingness to adequately fund charity regulation and shrink the tax-exempt sector by removing the parts that have limited justification to charitable benefits such as hospitals and private foundations.

Recommended Citation

Philip Hackney, Keep Charitable Oversight in the IRS, 15 Columbia Journal of Tax Law 130 (2024).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.pitt.edu/fac_articles/588