So you want to know who donates to the Kochtopus organizations? Good luck with that, because not only do they bury everything inside of non-profit organizations, but they also bury those inside of trusts organized to receive and move money through the different arms of their operation.
Documents released in recent months show the Kochs have added wrinkles to their network that even experts well versed in tax law and campaign finance say they’ve never seen before — wrinkles that could make it harder to discern who controls each nonprofit in the web and how it disperses its money.
A review of 2012 tax returns filed by Koch network groups shows that most have been set up as nonprofit trusts rather than not-for-profit corporations, an unusual step that reduces their public reporting requirements.
It sounds complicated and arcane because it is. Some of the nation’s top nonprofit experts said they could only speculate on the reasons for the network’s increasingly elaborate setup.
“My guess is that we’re looking at various forms of disguise — to disguise control, to disguise the flow of funds from one entity to another,” said Gregory Colvin, a tax lawyer and campaign-finance specialist in San Francisco who reviewed all the documents for ProPublica.
It's like Russian nesting dolls! I bet they learned that from their daddy's time with Stalin back in the day. I know they said they don't really pay attention to the day-to-day operations of their machines like Americans for Prosperity, but really, they do.
Four other leading nonprofit experts and three conservative operatives with knowledge of the Koch network said the most likely reason that the Kochs and their inner circle are using this arrangement was to exert control over the groups without saying publicly who was in charge. In particular, they said, the Kochs likely wanted to prevent any of the groups that they help fund from going against their wishes — as happened with the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank the Kochs had long supported before they got into a dispute with its president, Ed Crane.
Here are a few entities you won't see at the bottom of ads put out by Americans for Prosperity and other tentacles: ASMI, SLAH and TOHE. Read the rest of their article for explanations.
Alphabet soup converted to corrupt politics. Thanks, Koch brothers!
