Letter
Letter from USCCB General Counsel to IRS Regarding Proposed Regulations for Tax-Exempt Social Welfare Organizations (2014)
Letter from USCCB General Counsel to IRS Regarding Proposed Regulations for Tax-Exempt Social Welfare Organizations and Candidate-Related Political Activity, February 27, 2014
On behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, we respectfully submit the following comments to the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking ("NPRM") proposing to amend the regulations under section 501 (c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code concerning certain deemed "political" activities of tax-exempt social welfare organizations.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops ("USCCB") is an organization recognized by the IRS as exempt under section 501 (a), and described in section 501 {c)(3) as a church in section 170(b)(1 )(A)(i). The USCCB holds a group exemption letter issued by the IRS in 1946. The USCCB group ruling consists of Catholic churches and ministries throughout the United States which are also described in section 501 (c)(3).
USCCB appreciates the concerns that Treasury and IRS have set forth as prompting the NPRM. However, we believe the NPRM creates more problems than it solves and unnecessarily inhibits section 501 (c)(3) organizations from engaging in permitted activity and restricts their ability to give to and receive contributions from section 501 (c)(4) organizations. More importantly, any application of similar rules to a definition of political campaign intervention will likely limit the ability of section 501 (c)(3) organizations to engage in educational and otherwise charitable activity. In the case of churches and conventions or associations of churches, this kind of change would strip away the protection from governmental interference afforded by section 7611 as it relates to the most severe administrative action that the IRS can take against such organizations: revocation of their recognition of exemption from federal income taxes and advance assurance of deductibility with respect to their donors.