According to the IRS, the tax-exempt status of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH) was revoked on 5/10/2010 (PDF). The reason for this action is listed by the reporting organization Guidestar as a “failure to file a Form 990, 990-EZ, 990-N, or 990-PF for 3 consecutive years.” These forms are required of legitimate non-profit organizations for review by the IRS and the public.
While the current incarnation of AFTAH appears to have been active since 2006, we found only one form 990-EZ on file — for the year 2009 (PDF). In this, total receipts are listed as $110.000, out of which Peter LaBarbera received a salary of $75,000. For perspective, this is approximately the same salary plus benefits claimed by Exodus president Alan Chambers. Exodus lists eleven employees and a million dollar budget.
According to the IRS documentation on revocations (PDF), AFTAH can no longer be considered a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization, and there is no process for appeal. Donations made to them before 6/10/2011 are still deductible by donors, though any income after revocation may be taxed and require filing of a federal return. LaBarbera appears to have been aware of all this, as the donations section of the AFTAH website no longer claims tax-exempt status:
Before Revocation
After Revocation
However, the footer of the “About” page still claims donations are tax-deductible:
"About" page footer
AFTAH is one of a handful of anti-gay organizations classified by the venerable civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a hate group. According to the SPLC, this is due to LaBarbera’s intense marketing of untruths which paint gays and lesbians in a false and negative light (eg. promoting the claims of the discredited Paul Cameron, claims of a disproportionate incidence of pedophilia in gays, and Scott Lively’s assertion that gays headed the Nazi party, etc).
Thousands of organizations exist which claim that homosexuality is a sin or otherwise immoral, only eighteen are listed as true hate groups by the SPLC. AFTAH is one of them.
Edited 9:33 am to include AFTAH footer.
Nice work. All these guys shooting themselves in the foot… First NARTH gets jettisoned from the CBBS for not paying its fees, and now Peter LaBarbera loses his tax-exempt status for failing to fill in forms.
I can’t think of a single explanation, outside sheer neglect and laziness, that one wouldn’t file their organization’s returns for 3 years in a row. Obviously AFTAH doesn’t have an accounting dept, otherwise this would not have gone overlooked.
I suspect that the failure to file was not necessarily based on laziness or neglect.
990’s provide a good deal of information: major donors, expenditures, grants, officers, compensation, programs, etc. And, most likely, Peter had something which he simply could not publicly reveal.
I’m guessing it was ‘major donor’ info. We would, of course, leap on disclosures from ‘legitimate’ organizations and Peter may have had no choice.
Going forward, AFTAH will have to decide on their corporate structure. They will have to file as something. I wouldn’t be surprised if some new entity is created.
To borrow the words used by a former UK Home Secretary on receiving a different piece of news, “Is it too early to open a bottle?”
Why doesn’t he have to pay back taxes. Seems he got away with a scam so he could pay himself with donations..
I am from Mexico, and in the past I had read the terrific arguments against ours -the world LGBT people- that Peter Labarbera has claimed. Is not only about the LGBT (as we say in the Americas) american people. His terrific claims of hate damages the international LGBT people. And the thing that personally shocks me, is that he manages his hate in the name of religion.
Fortunately, as Truth Wins Out has reported, there are christian denominations that -little by little- are leaving the -based on religion- anti-gay wagon.
Thank you.
He will have to pay back taxes to 2010 – the year his 501C3 was revoked. It won’t be a king’s ransom, but it will hurt. Failure to file a 990 is not as uncommon as one would think. Most people who run 501C3’s are not accountants and fail to understand the importance of it. It’s a fairly simple form to fill out, as far as IRS forms go, but the tendency is to blow it off as unimportant because it doesn’t seem to be mission-critical to the organization. Believe me, I know, I stepped in mid-term as treasurer for an LGBT group and this situation was the first thing I was confronted with. We ended up having to take a bath on taxes, but a good tax accountant can help minimize the impact, which is what happened.
AFTAH, however, is a one-man operation, and the one man is a one-trick pony (no, not that kind of trick!), and obviously is not skillful in filing the necessary paperwork for his operation. Given all of the above stuff, he’s likely reincorporated under a different structure – same old hatred, slightly different accounting ground rules.
Tim makes a very good point above though. If there was/is something to hide, it would be a very good reason not to file it, and just deal with the consequences later. Sadly, there are dozens of accounting maneuvers to make sure this information is kept under wraps. I am just amazed at the $75,000 figure!
I caution those who see tax fraud here to familiarize themselves with tax law. There likely is no distinction in the amount of taxes AFTAH would have paid either way.
Even if AFTAH were categorized as a for-profit corporation, it would only pay taxes as would a corporation: on profit, not revenues. If AFTAH received $110,000 and paid LaBarbera $75,000 and spent the remaining $35,000 on rent, utilities, printing, website and other costs, then it would have no net income (profit) and would pay no taxes.
In either case, The Peter would personally pay income tax on his own salary of $75,000.
The issue here is not about whether AFTAH pays taxes, but rather that their donors cannot now deduct their contributions on their individual income tax returns.
On July 20, 2011, LaBarbera tweeted the following:
@PeterLaBarbera Peter LaBarbera
One thing great about working at Starbucks is hearing old classics from my college days: Bob Marley’s Jah Man is on their frequent play list
20 Jul via Twitter for BlackBerry®
https://twitter.com/#!/PeterLaBarbera
I take it that this means he was forced to take a job at Starbucks to supplement whatever income he is making off of AFTAH. It is hard to see how the group could continue to take in revenue that would sustain a $75K salary for him, since the group accomplishes very little.
What does LaBarbera actually do when he shows up to work?
Well, he posts once or twice a week to his website. The posts themselves are little more than a cut and pastes from some other blog or news source with a few sentences from LaBarbera himself. There is a weekly radio show on a local Illinois Christian station. But that consists of nothing more than a 50 minute telephone conversation with a guest. A conversation with a single guest is drawn out to fill up 2, 3 or even 4 weeks. For example, he recently had the batty Judith Reisman on for four (4!) weeks.
There is no evidence that he does much if anything to prepare for these interviews. For example, he hadn’t even read Reisman’s book in preparation for his 4-part interview. And he does no original reporting or analysis. Even more egregiously, he posts about the show on his site, and that counts against his 1-2 weekly posts.
Finally, there is his “Truth Academy” which takes place once a year over a day and a half, and which is basically the same people that he interviews on his radio show, only all together in a hotel dining room.
So being ridiculously generous, we’ll say he works an hour/week on the website. An hour a week on the radio show. Let’s again be generous and throw in a few hours a month to set up guests and to pay bills. Let’s continue the charity and give him a full hour/week for his tweets. The Academy runs for a total of 14 hours over 2 days, and he presumably requires some time print up an agenda on his Commodore 64, and to arrange for the cheapest possible food and beverages with Motel 6. So let’s give him 30 hours for this event and the set-up.
This tally is probably overstating things, since the radio show doesn’t run 52 weeks out of the year and his tweets are arguably not compensable. But whatever. Even giving him all benefit of the doubt, that comes out to about 4 hours of work per week, one-half of a standard 8-hour workday. This is what LaBarbera calls on his website a “full-time organization” which represents “the culmination of LaBarbera’s 22 years of professional and media experience”. (https://americansfortruth.com/about) The sad thing is, that description is probably true.
Is there a penalty for willfully misleading donors into thinking that their donations are tax-deductible? For large donations, LaBarBear would probably have to provide the donor with a receipt that says it is tax-deductible. But anyone else could look today on his about page and see that he is still lying about donations being tax-deductible. That seems like fraud to me… would hate to see LaBarBear’s ass thrown in jail for violations of the tax-code… not really, it would actually be karmic.
There are penalties to be paid for failure to file a 990, as I recall.
Dr. Michael Brown has an article that can be found on a link at Joe. My. God.
Dr. Brown is calling the SPLC the REAL hate group. And he goes on to play the victim card from the bottom of the deck on how bigoted and unfair the SPLC is on people of good conscious.
What a %#$$*, piece of work! Couldn’t you just throw up?
I’m going to be generous about Gerard’s assumption above, which I believe to be basically true, and assume 8 hours per week. That a one-day per week job at $75K per year. This means slightly over $180.00 per hour for what he does. $180 an hour to slander and scandalize people you don’t approve of or like. I’m in the wrong line of work!
Slightly off-topic, but I see that LaBarbera has found a new poster child for “ex-Trans” – a character by the name of Walt Heyer ( https://sites.google.com/site/transchristians/people/walt-heyer ) has been running around doing a lot of interviews etc. to promote his latest book. (and apparently donated a couple of hours of interview time to LaBarbera)
I know that “ex-Trans” is arguably not the primary focus of this blog, but it is relevant for trans readers of this space to be aware that even though Jerry Leach seems to have fallen off the radar, there are still those pushing ‘ex-Trans’ in an effort to invalidate trans narratives.
Took long enough. I reported this in circa 2008
@David Hart
I’m confused. AFTAH’s tax-exempt revocation didn’t happen until 2010 and wasn’t public until 2011. What did you report on in 2008?
I’m so happy. I reported him for not filing as I was trying to force disclosure of who the major donor was who put up $10,000 a few years ago as a “matching” donation. I believe there are only a few donors who are supplying the majority of his funding and he has not filed to protect these donors.
@Timothy Kincaid You called that right. A few years ago he had a fundraising campaign where someone supposedly gave $10K. By not filing, he kept the identity of that person secret.
Slime like Peter La Bar Bra manipulates to no end. A 501C3 created with planned obsolescence via covert intent is not only plausible, it’s typical i.e. standard op procedure. Jumping up and down at this supposed win would most likely bring nothing more than a smirk, chuckle and a muffled “whatever” from the slithering porn boy himself.
In calculating what Peter does each week, don’t forget his hours spent picketing. I’ve seen him with an older guy standing on a fairly busy road and holding signs they probably made with poster board and magic marker. But if his hourly rate works out to $180/hour, then that’s pretty good money for standing around with signs no one can read.