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Yes, ACORN Does Cheat on Its Taxes


Kudos to the Pelican Institute for excellent research, and to Deroy Murdock and the American Spectator‘s Quin Hillyer for resurrecting the issue of ACORN’s tax cheating.

I had this story almost a year ago.

The piece, Lien on Me, ran in the American Spectator online on Oct. 28, 2008.

It begins:

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and its affiliates are content to impose crippling big-government laws, regulations, and taxes on Americans, but when called upon to obey those same rules, ACORN’s network of scofflaws and deadbeats simply refuses to comply.

The most egregious example is the fact that more than 200 federal, state, and local tax liens adding up to more than $3 million have been filed against the ACORN network since 1989. All of these liens, which are only issued by creditor tax agencies after a tax debt has become seriously delinquent, are associated with ACORN’s 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue address in New Orleans, Louisiana. That address is the official headquarters for nearly 300 ACORN-affiliated groups.

The most recent lien ($23,383) was filed by the IRS against an ACORN affiliate, American Workers Associates Inc., on Sept. 9. The largest lien ($547,312) was filed against ACORN itself by the IRS on March 10. […]

Murdock references a $548,000 lien. If in haste he rounded up, it might be the $547,312 lien I discovered.

ACORN also sold out its poor constituents in Brooklyn in exchange for a cash bailout from Forest City Ratner, a wealthy developer trying to build the Atlantic Yards project.

Matthew Vadum

The author of Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books, 2011), Vadum, former senior vice president at CRC, writes and speaks widely…
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