Stories like this one won’t exactly help the GOP’s talking points about being the morally superior political party.
The Republican Governors Association (RGA), the largest 527 group allied with the GOP, has informed the IRS that it failed to report millions of dollars in receipts and expenditures last year.
The errors misrepresented the organization’s fundraising and political activities in the months leading up to the gubernatorial races in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi and the recall of Gov. Gray Davis (D) in California.
Campaign-finance watchdog groups that monitor 527 groups, named after the section tax code under which they are organized, said the errors call into question the ability and incentive of the IRS to track soft-money fundraising.
Well, maybe, but don’t the “errors” also call into question the ability of the Republican Governors Association to manage their own financial affairs and follow the law? After all, this is a group of state executives who oversee multi-billion dollar budgets and are responsible for collecting their own state taxes.
A closer look shows that we’re not just talking about rounding errors here.
Amended IRS filings show that the RGA failed to report more than $3 million or nearly 20 percent of the $15.7 million it raised in 2003. The filings also show that the organization failed to report close to $4 million or 25 percent of $15.5 million in expenditures.
The newest batch of amended filings follows changes the RGA made to its 2002 fundraising reports, which underreported the organization’s receipts in the last three months of that year by close to $4.5 million.
The group misreported its receipts and expenditures in all 12 of its fundraising reports for 2003.
I’m sure we’ll soon here that the RGA just has a few “bad apples” who managed to misplace $3 million…