Unfortunately, all of us are too familiar with “robocalls”: telephone solicitations for any given number of causes. They’re irritating, and they tend to disrupt family dinners. Occurring at times when you least want them to, they often involve aggressively persistent attempts to collect donations. Maybe you just hang up on them, or maybe you’ve given in and sent a few bucks their way.
Well, it turns out one of the major players in this practice was just caught in what is, in the most generous of interpretations, an unethical manipulation of IRS regulations. At worst, what they did was downright illegal.
Wisconsinite John W. Connors operates various political nonprofits under a little-known section of the IRS Tax Code, Section 527. When these nonprofits became implicated in a robocalling scheme, the 37-year-old, along with two of his former college classmates, became three of the biggest political fraudsters in the United States.
College Grad Connors Creates “Campaign Now”
After graduating from Marquette University, Connors founded Campaign Now — the first of the five political nonprofits under which he would ultimately develop a massive robocalling scheme. Under the scheme, the organizations claimed to collect donations for political causes. But they often did everything but that. Campaign Now’s website indicates Connors’ title as “Boss Man.”
Connors operated Campaign Now with two peers from Marquette — Simon Lewis and Kyle Maichle. While the three were Marquette students, roughly 15 years ago, they were all active in Republican student groups.
Lewis and Maichle later went on to found their own organizations. Lewis, 37, founded the National Police Support Fund (NPSF). Maichle served as the organization’s treasurer, though tax records indicate otherwise. After serving as a researcher for Connors at Campaign Now, Maichle founded Precision Compliance Consulting in 2017. Connors assisted in the foundation of this consulting group. Eventually, other organizations were set up by all three men. Importantly, many of the organizations the three men created and operated were what is known as “527 organizations.”
What is a “527 Organization”?
A “527 organization” is a political nonprofit organized under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code (26 U.S.C. Section 527). The goal of these kinds of organizations is to influence the selection, appointment, defeat, or nomination of political candidates.
Due to loopholes in this part of the tax code, the operators of 527 organizations can technically funnel the money they purportedly collect for political causes into their own pocketbooks. One of such problems arises from how loosely-worded the language in relevant portions of how the IRS stipulates money be collected and used by such organizations. The IRS only requires that funds be “primarily used” or purposes that 527 organizations claim they collect donations. IRS.gov reads that such organizations are “organized and operated primarily for the purpose of directly or indirectly accepting contributions.“
When Connor and his collaborators saw the opportunity, they milked the heck out of the 527 loophole.
Sham Shell Companies Scam Donors
The three men used telemarketing to cold-call potential donors for their purported nonprofits. They started with human callers, and eventually switch to robocalls. Sounding deceptively human, the automated calls would open with a joke. In any given call, the automated donation-solicitors would collect funds from the unsuspecting people unfortunate enough to have answered.
Lewis’ company, NPSF, sought donations under the guise of its stated mission to benefit causes for law enforcement. The funds collected were purported to be for “political support services,” bookkeeping, and consulting. As it turns out, the majority of the money raised by NPSF made its way back to Lewis, in ways that would suggest he pocketed the money as personal income. Only a small fraction of the money raised was actually directed to police causes.
On multiple occasions, NPSF reported no business transactions with its own board members. But NPSF had often engaged in such transactions with Lewis. In fact, Lewis himself signed a declaration to the IRS stating as much. When questioned about the inconsistency, NPSF claimed in a statement, “this appears to be a scrivener’s error on the part of the accountant. This happens.”
In 2015, Campaign Now seemed to have found their newest and biggest client, known as Veteran Actions Network. In realty, it was merely another nonprofit set up Connors and his associates, which ultimately was discovered to be one of the organizations through which donations were funneled.
Before Veteran Actions Network shut down in 2019, it had raised $6.1 million. Of that money, $102,000 made its way to Campaign Now, while an additional $112,000 was funneled to companies owned by Connors, Lewis, or Maichle, according to tax records revealed in a New York Times report. One of the three had been listed as either owners or partners of the companies. Records indicate that this pattern of channeling donations through a variety of companies continued for years.
At one point, Connors and his associates were operating five different 527 organizations carrying out some version of this scheme. Since the years of their founding, the nonprofits have paid $2.8 million to companies controlled by the three men. That money was funneled through shell corporations in what appears to be a money-laundering tactic. This method would allow the companies to hide the fact that only an extremely small fraction of any donations that were collected went to the intended political causes.
A National Problem
All in all, over the court of roughly a decade, the groups defrauded the public of millions of dollars under the guise of promoting and facilitating political involvement amongst average Americans.
When asked about the 527 organizations, Connors claimed, “I do this to help people without a voice organize, raise money, and design a platform. Yes, I am paid for what I do (everybody is) but my real compensation is the satisfaction of Americans getting involved in the system.” But it looks like he and his college classmates had other, profit-oriented motives.
Connors’, Lewis’, and Maichle’s enterprises are not isolated incidents. The governments of all but two states have at some point sued a company for fraudulent robocalling schemes. Just last year, 51 state attorneys general from across the nation formed the Anti-Robocall Multistate Litigation Task Force in order to investigate such companies and hold them accountable. This organization filed a lawsuit against a telecommunications company they accuse of defrauding Americans by making 7.5 billion robocalls to people on the National Do Not Call Registry.
But despite recent government action, current regulations may be insufficient for preventing these kinds of abuses, as robocalls still run large. Until then, keep a close eye on your caller ID — and your wallet.
Related Resources
- Charity Scams on the Increase (FindLaw’s Law and Daily Life blog)
- FCC Leaves It to Carriers to Block Robocalls (FindLaw’s Technologist blog)
- Can You Sue Telemarketers? (FindLaw’s Law and Daily Life blog)
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