Letter Follows Release of Senate Finance Committee Minority Staff Report, ‘The NRA and Russia: How a Tax-Exempt Organization Became a Foreign Asset’

U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) sent a letter formally calling on the Internal Revenue Service to investigate whether the NRA violated tax laws and should lose its tax-exempt status as a result.

The letter follows the release of a Senate Finance Committee minority staff report, “The NRA and Russia: How a Tax-Exempt Organization Became a Foreign Asset.” The report, initiated at the request of Senator Wyden, the Senate Finance Committee’s ranking member, was an 18-month investigation into the NRA’s relationship with Russia and potential violations of U.S. tax and sanctions laws. In addition, over the past several months there have been a series of public disclosures and reports revealing substantial evidence of serious and wide-ranging financial impropriety at the NRA – including self-dealing, improper enrichment of organization insiders, conflicts of interest, and violations of the not-for-profit laws.  As a result, there are now active regulatory investigations by the Attorneys General of the District of Columbia and New York State.

The report, released last week, concluded that the “use of [the] NRA’s tax-exempt funds and resources in this manner raise concerns about the use of tax-exempt resources for a non-exempt purpose, private inurement… and prohibited excess benefit transactions.”

In April 2019, Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund filed a complaint about the NRA’s tax-exempt status with the IRS, and called for federal and state investigations into the NRA’s operation as a tax-exempt organization.