As you may know, the Commission on Presidential Debates (“CPD”) is a nasty organization that works to keep Republican and Democratic Party presidential candidates in the spotlight, while ensuring that all other candidates stay out of the spotlight.
CPD has been granted a 501(c)(3) classification by the IRS. That means it has tax-exemption privileges, and donations to CPD are tax-deductible. I think this is wrong.
My opinion is that CPD violates the conditions of its privileged tax-exempt status whenever it holds one of these exclusive candidate forums.
I have already filed one complaint about this issue. View the complaint here.
Any concerned citizen may file a complaint with the IRS about this. I encourage you to file a complaint too. It is pretty easy to do. The more complaints the IRS receives about this, the better the chance they will at least perform an investigation.
View this IRS page with information on filing a complaint against a tax-exempt organization.
(For some reason, the page does not have a direct link to Form 13909. You can get it here.)
In 1996 the IRS released a “technical advice memorandum” on this issue. The text of that is on the next post.
View this page to get more information about tax-exempt organizations and political campaigns.
