More scrutiny, not less.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills - Tax exemption policy of the Internal Revenue Service - Brief article

For the Internal Revenue Service and tax-exempt groups, the real scandal lies not with the few that have been over-investigated, but with the many that continue to function with too little scrutiny. As of 2012, there were 1,616,053 organizations in this country that were tax exempt--supposedly on the basis that, among other things, they are nonprofit. Time's Michael Grunwald, a journalist with a gift for raising questions that seldom occur to other reporters, asks why an organization that doesn't make a profit should need to be tax exempt. After all, income taxes don't have to be paid if an organization doesn't have a profit.

Grunwald...