NEA defends actions as IRS begins audit

WASHINGTON — The IRS has begun auditing the National Education Association, which has allocated millions of dollars to elect pro-education candidates while reporting on tax forms that it does not spend union dues on politics.

While promising cooperation, the president of the nation’s largest teachers union is also pledging to "vigorously defend our constitutional right to speak to our members about the role of politics in public education."

NEA spokeswoman Kathleen Lyons said Monday the audit began last week. "It will be a complete, thorough audit," she said. "The IRS has not singled out any particular aspect of our activities."

But Reg Weaver, the union’s president, said the "NEA will not be silenced" by the audit or complaints from a conservative foundation that it has wrongly engaged in political activities without disclosing them.

Union members "have a right to be involved in politics. Our organization will not back down in the face of those who want to bully us out of our rights as Americans," Weaver said.

The NEA has tax-exempt status as a union but must report political expenses "direct and indirect" on its tax return. Some of those expenses could be considered taxable by the IRS. The IRS defines a political expense as "one intended to influence the selection, nomination, election or appointment of anyone to a federal, state, or local public office."

The Associated Press reviewed the NEA’s filings from years 1993 through 1999, reporting in a series of stories that the NEA has said on its tax returns that no union dues were spent on politics despite extensive internal memos laying out numerous union-funded political activities.

Hundreds of pages of internal NEA documents showed the 2.7 million-member union spent millions of dollars to help elect pro-education candidates, produce political training guides and gather teachers’ voting records.