IRS Pulls Tax Exemptions From 12 Lakeville Nonprofits

The Internal Revenue Service this week revoked the tax exemptions for 12 Lakeville nonprofit organizations because they did not meet legal requirements to file annual tax forms, or did not file legally required annual reports for three consecutive years.

They are:

• The Lakeville Teen Center
• Sycamore Tree, Inc.
• Sno-Fest, Inc.
• The Lakeville American Legion
• Giant Step Theater
• The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
• Honeycomb Ministries of Lakeville
• Someone Treasure
• The Stone Family Organization
• United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation, Inc.
• LHS Choir Boosters
• Avodah Services

Those organizations were just a small sample of the 275,000 nationwide that lost exemptions.

Lois Lerner, director of the division of the IRS that oversees tax-exempt groups, told the New York Times that the agency believed most of the organizations on the list were defunct, though there was really no way to know because so many of them couldn’t be reached.

“In many cases, we didn’t have a good address because the last one was many years old and they hadn’t had to file since then because they weren’t big enough,” Lerner said in the article.

Until a change in federal law in 2006, only organizations with annual revenue of $25,000 or more—roughly one-third of the 1.6 million nonprofit groups—were required to file, the article said.

For nonprofits on the list that have an annual revenue of $25,000, the IRS has created a process to reapply for tax exemption, including a reduced fee of $100.