Unpaid members of a church who volunteer to help staff a church restaurant without the expectation of being paid are not considered employees subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act.  The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a trial court decision ordering the church to pay more than $388,000 in damages.

The Tax Court has upheld an IRS denial of a charitable contribution deduction for a developer’s grant of a conservation easement on 125 acres it planned for a public park adjacent to its planned unit development.  The developer had claimed a deduction of $1,798,000 for the easement.

The Appalachian Bible College in West Virginia has won an unopposed judgment in its suit to enforce a $400,000 pledge from a corporate donor. The donor had said it was financially unable to meet the commitment.

A new academic study has concluded that 7.1% of all U.S. corporate charitable giving, about $1.3 billion annually, is politically motivated and correlated with the relevance of the Congressional representative of the charity’s district to the business interests of the corporation.  The authors conclude that this charitable giving may be a form of political influence that goes mostly undetected by voters and shareholders, and is directly subsidized by taxpayers.

The Tax Court has confirmed the action of the Internal Revenue Service in retroactively revoking the 501(c)(3) charitable status of the Association for Honest Attorneys.  The IRS had determined that the Association had been operating primarily for the private benefit of its founder as far back as January 1, 2010 and not in the public interest.

Congress has continued the prohibition on the Internal Revenue Service defining the limits of political activity for 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations in a provision buried deep within the 2,232-page Omnibus Spending Bill for 2018.