6th Circuit Hears IRS Donor Disclosure Challenge as Supreme Court Rules on Nonprofit Privacy in Parallel Case

U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on April 29 in Buckeye Institute v. IRS, a case challenging the IRS’s requirements that certain nonprofit organizations disclose personal information about their substantial donors, the Washington Examiner reported.

On the same day, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in First Choice Women’s Resource Center v. The ruling addressed a subpoena from New Jersey’s Attorney General to a pro-life pregnancy center demanding personal information of donors behind 5,000 donations. The IRS requires many 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations to disclose the total number of contributions received every year.

The agency also requires these organizations to disclose the names and addresses of all substantial contributors. Substantial contributors are defined as those who contribute an aggregate total of $5,000 per tax year, if the contributed amount is more than two percent of the total contributions the organization receives in a tax year.

U.S. Treasury Department’s cybersecurity systems and stole unclassified documents. S. Treasury Department called the hacking incident a major incident. Past incidents include a 2022 event where the IRS accidentally posted taxpayer information for 501(c)(3)s reported on Form 990-T, according to the Washington Examiner.

In 2014, an IRS employee disclosed an unredacted Form 990 for the National Organization for Marriage to a person claiming to be a reporter. The National Organization for Marriage is a group advocating laws to define marriage as between a man and a woman. The alleged reporter sent the 2014 unredacted Form 990 to the Human Rights Campaign, a group advocating same-sex marriage.

Information from the 2014 Form 990 was used to attack Mitt Romney for his donations to the National Organization for Marriage. In 2012, the IRS leaked information relating to applications for tax-exempt status of several conservative organizations to ProPublica. In 2013, the IRS disclosed information about 31 other groups.

In 2021, ProPublica obtained personal tax information from the IRS for thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people. ProPublica referred to the 2021 IRS information as The Secret IRS Files and the Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records.

Davenport drew on precedent from NAACP v. Alabama, where the state sought to access the NAACP’s donor records.