(C) OpenDemocracy
This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
DAFs: How ‘donor-advised funds’ let anonymous US givers bankroll global hate [1]
[]
Date: 2023-11
A loophole in US charity law is letting anonymous donors hand hundreds of millions of dollars to ‘culture war’ groups campaigning globally against women’s and LGBTIQ rights, a nine-month investigation by openDemocracy has found.
Recipients of the $272m funnelled through special accounts called ‘donor advised funds’ (DAFs) in the four tax years from 2017 to 2020 included at least two US groups linked to the political organising in Uganda that preceded its brutal ‘kill the gays’ law, as well as groups that have argued for the statutory castration of transgender people in Europe and been implicated in anti-LGBTIQ ‘conversion therapy’ even in US states where the practice is restricted.
Anonymity makes it impossible for campaigners to understand where the money that bankrolls anti-rights groups ultimately comes from, and frustrates their efforts to hold backers accountable or persuade them away from funding hate.
openDemocracy scraped and analysed data on nearly 2,000 US funders to investigate money flows to a set of 36 American far-right groups that work to restrict the rights of women and LGBTIQ people. They include four organisations that the Southern Poverty Law Center has labelled hate groups, two that partner with these hate groups, and 30 others that openDemocracy has tracked for years. This initial analysis found that 12 DAF operators accounted for half of the money that these far-right groups got from US philanthropy.
Get our free Daily Email Get one whole story, direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up now
We closely reviewed more than 15,000 pages of grant reports that the 12 biggest DAF operators filed with US tax authorities. According to these documents, the operators gave the 36 groups more than 600 grants from 2017 to 2020, the most recent year available for examination.
More than 40% ($113m) of the DAF funds tracked by openDemocracy went to four groups that are designated as anti-LGBTIQ hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC): Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), Family Research Council (FRC), Family Watch International (FWI), and Liberty Counsel.
Tax breaks
A donor-advised fund is an account that an organisation, a family, or individuals can open with a US non-profit for the purpose of managing charitable donations. These funds offer significant US tax breaks for a donor, as well as – crucially – a structure that shields them from any controversy stirred up by their intended recipients.
This is important because charitable donations in the US are otherwise publicly visible upon request through tax filings. In other words, if you are a billionaire who wants to give to a group that is in the news for fighting trans people but you don’t want to be publicly associated with the controversy, you open a DAF with an organisation registered as a US non-profit and channel that donation through it.
Critics of the system, however, say such dark money flows from donor-advised funds are a threat to human rights and justice, much like the tsunamis of anonymous money that prop up the US political campaign system.
That anonymity “works very much to the benefit of people who want to hide who they're giving money to,” especially for those backing groups increasingly under the spotlight for fueling disinformation, hate speech and violence, says Heidi Beirich of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
The use of DAFs as a channel for philanthropy in the US has grown massively in recent decades. Each of the 12 DAF operators examined in this investigation receives more than $1bn (the equivalent of about £790m) a year.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/donor-advised-funds-daf-us-charity-law-loophole-bankroll-hate/
Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/
