[Rooters] The U.S. Republican Party filed a formal complaint against one of Hillary Clinton's family charities with the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday and is calling for an audit after the charity said this week it would not refile erroneous tax returns.
The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation's flagship health program conceded earlier this year it had misreported by millions of the dollars the money it was given by governments compared with non-government donors in its tax returns for 2012 and 2013.
The charities have come under intense scrutiny this year with Hillary Clinton remaining the favorite to become the Democratic Party's nominee in the November 2016 presidential election.
The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) originally said it was amending the forms, known as form 990s, after Reuters discovered the errors in the spring. This week, CHAI said it had decided against refiling, saying the errors had "no material impact," CHAI spokeswoman Maura Daley said.
The Republican National Committee disagrees, its chairman, Reince Priebus, said on Tuesday in his letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, a copy of which was given to Reuters.
"The American people deserve to know whether the largest philanthropic arm of the Clinton Foundation continues to misreport the funds it receives from foreign governments, and whether this might lead to the potential for further conflicts of interest," Priebus wrote.
Daley declined to comment beyond repeating that CHAI "does not believe a refiling is necessary." CHAI says the total amount of income was correctly reported for both years, but the breakdown of government against non-government funding had been muddled up.
Spokesmen for Hillary Clinton did not respond to requests for comment.
[Daily Caller] A new report finds that in the past decade, federal agencies held the highest percentage of closed-door meetings in 2013 and 2014, undermining President Obama's commitment to running the "most transparent administration in history."
The report, from the Congressional Research Service, looked at data provided by federal agencies under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).
The executive branch utilizes federal advisory committees as a way to allow outside experts to provide advice and recommendations to the president and to federal agencies. According to the report, 825 federal advisory committees with 68,179 members held 7,173 meetings in fiscal year 2014, all at a cost of $334 million.
Most meetings are held by grant review committees or are special emphasis panel meetings and are often closed to protect advice provided by subject matter experts who require secrecy in order to provide honest opinions. Other meetings are closed in order to protect proprietary information provided by grant applicants.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
