Clinton
charity, under pressure, will amend tax return errors
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[November 05, 2015]
By Jonathan Allen
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Bill, Hillary &
Chelsea Clinton Foundation's flagship health project changed its mind
again on Wednesday on the matter of its erroneous tax returns, saying it
would refile them with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service after all.
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The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) said the decision to
refile its 2012 and 2013 returns was in response to "recent media
interest."
Its brief statement made no mention of Republican criticism earlier
in the week, when CHAI said it had decided against refiling the
returns, known as form 990s. That, in turn, was a switch from the
spring, when it said it would refile them after Reuters discovered
it had misreported funding sources by millions of dollars.
"As previously stated, the minor errors on the 2012 and 2013 CHAI
990s are immaterial and do not require refiling, yet in response to
recent media interest in the forms, CHAI has decided to refile the
returns in order to be fully transparent," CHAI spokeswoman Maura
Daley said in the statement.
With Hillary Clinton viewed as the favorite to become the Democratic
nominee in the November, 2016, presidential election, Republicans
have attacked her family's globe-straddling charities.
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The charities have received millions of dollars of funding from
foreign governments for their work on health and environmental
projects. Republicans and other critics say this is an insoluble
conflict of interest for a would-be U.S. president. CHAI is best
known for helping reduce the cost of HIV drugs in the developing
world.
Clinton has said her family's charities do worthy work and disclose
more information about the donors than the law requires, mitigating
that concern.
But she has not addressed the charities' admission to Reuters
earlier this year that they did not comply with an ethics agreement
Clinton signed with Barack Obama's incoming presidential
administration in 2008 in order for her to become secretary of
state. That agreement required the names of every donor be published
annually, with the State Department ethicists screening new funding
from foreign governments. The charities did not do this or did so
incompletely, citing "oversights".
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On Tuesday, Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee's
chairman, sent a letter calling on the IRS to audit CHAI and to
compel the charity to amend the errors. On Wednesday, he responded
to CHAI's decision to refile by saying an audit remained the only
way to ensure all foreign government funding had been accounted for.
"CHAI has failed to comply with federal tax rules or the ethics
agreement the Clintons negotiated with the Obama Administration," he
said in a statement, "and re-filing erroneous returns seven months
after the fact amid political pressure is hardly a show of good
faith."
The IRS is barred by law from discussing specific cases. Spokesmen
for Hillary Clinton did not respond to questions about the
charities.
CHAI says the total amount of donations was correctly reported to
the IRS in 2012 and 2013, but that the breakdown for how much came
from government sources compared to non-government donors was
incorrect.
Charities do not pay taxes on their donations, but must complete tax
returns and make them public to demonstrate compliance with
assurances made to get tax-exempt status.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by David Gregorio)
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