ACORN Owes Millions in Taxes

ACORN Owes Millions in Taxes
by Amanda Carpenter

An intrepid researcher has discovered more than 200 tax liens totaling more than $3.7 million have been filed by the government against the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now for unpaid taxes since the late eighties.

A tax lien is issued when a person or organization fails to pay taxes and that tax debt is considered seriously delinquent. A lien is only issued after the government makes several unsuccessful attempts to collect the debt.

The conservative-leaning Capital Research Center’s Matthew Vadum found a staggering number of liens listed against ACORN’s national headquarters at 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans, Louisiana while conducting an exhaustive investigation of ACORN's history and current activities.

“I took that address and plugged it into Nexis and did a public records search for tax liens,” Vadum said. “At least 230 tax liens corresponded to ACORN’s address and they were all from ACORN’s shadowy network of affiliates.”

The liens filed against ACORN and their associated groups come from the Internal Revenue Service and government officials in fifteen different states.

75 of the 230 tax liens appear to have been “released,” meaning the full debt was paid or a negotiated payment was made for the debt. The rest are outstanding.

The "shadowy network" Vadum mentioned are the hundreds of ACORN offshoots housed at ACORN's official 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue address, such as Project Vote, ACORN Institute Inc., ACORN Housing Inc. Inc and Wal-Mart Alliance for Reform Now (WARN). One of those organizations is Citizens Consulting, Inc, which was paid nearly $800,000 by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign to conduct get-out-the-vote activities during the Democratic primary.

While CSI raked in cash from the Obama campaign the IRS was preparing nearly a million in liens against ACORN. The IRS filed a lien on ACORN for $306,407 on March 6, 2008. A different lien was filed for $547,312 against ACORN on March 10, 2008 and another was filed on March 14 for $132,997.

Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R.-Ohio)and other Republicans have called on Congress to strip ACORN of their federal funding, which has received at least $31 million in various grants since 1998, because of ACORN's role in rampant vote registration fraud across the nation, but Democrats have not expressed any interest in doing this.

“ACORN is a relentless crusader for social programs and government wealth redistribution schemes and the fact they can’t be bothered to pay taxes speaks volumes about the integrity of the organization,” Vadum said.

Vadum recently published his report about ACORN and it is available HERE.