Flashback 2001. The New York Observer reports on Skull and Bones. Are they tax cheats?
First on the agenda was a quick examination of the Bones income-tax filings, which an outside consultant to the team had obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. He and Peggy Adler pointed out to me a couple of dubious assertions on the Form 990’s (Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax), which called into question certain of the grounds for charitable exemption. In particular, there was the assertion in the 1997 RTA Incorporated filing (Part VI, line 80b) that the organization was not “related … through common membership, governing bodies, trustees, officers etc. to any other exempt or non-exempt organization.”Tax cheats or just grave robbers?
Contradicting that assertion is information on the filing of the Deer Island Club Corporation. Deer Island is the private island of the Skull and Bones Society, located in the St. Lawrence River. It is the place where Bones members bring their families for summer get-togethers. It is wholly owned and run by Skull and Bones members, apparently contradicting Bones’ claim of “no relationship” to another exempt organization, and appearing to contradict the strictly educational and charitable mission for which RTA gets its exemption for Skull and Bones.
The consultant argues in a memo that the purpose of the 80b question on the Bones deduction claim form “is to prevent tax exempt charities from undertaking non-charitable activities by hiding them in another corporation. This is of course precisely what RTA Inc. is accomplishing through the Deer Island Club Corporation. In order to conceal this arrangement however RTA Inc. denies its connection to the DICC.”
In fact, he goes on, “RTA and the DICC are so closely linked that for all intents and purposes RTA Inc. does own Deer Island despite its claims to the contrary.”
I’m not going to go into the whole tax issue here. Perhaps the Bones shell corporation has a good and valid reason for claiming that it has no connection to the Bones private-island country club.** Perhaps this sort of thing goes on all the time among the private charities of the privileged. I don’t think Deer Island will become George W. Bush’s Whitewater. But one might think that a scrupulous White House counsel would want to look at the kind of tax information George W.’s secret society is filing on his behalf. Particularly since he’s promising enormous windfalls for the privileged, the tax breaks his secret society takes should be utterly beyond suspicion. Does the President, I’d like to know, claim his Skull and Bones dues as a charitable deduction, when the only charity seems to be providing a club house and country house for the privileged? The RTA filing claims Skull and Bones exists “for the benefit of Yale University.” But Yale–which celebrates three centuries of luminous atainments this weekend–ought to question what “benefit” it gets from chants of “lick my bumhole” and the mockery of Abner Louima.
