Political operatives controlling linked nonprofits raised $89 million in small donations from tens of thousands of donors since 2014 using pro-police and pro-veteran robocalls, but instead of using the money to promote issues and candidates, they have pocketed nearly all the money, an analysis by the New York Times finds.

According to the Times, a group of nonprofits that include the National Police Support Fund, the American Police Officers Alliance, the American Veterans Honor Fund, the Firefighters and EMS Fund, and the now-shuttered Veterans Action Network have used their tax-exempt status under the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 527 to leverage lax oversight and a blind spot in the campaign finance system to minimize their aid to actual candidates. By doing so, these groups have “avoided scrutiny from the Federal Election Commission and most state watchdogs and put their groups under the jurisdiction of a distracted and underfunded regulator, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS),” the Times reports.

In its analysis, the Times reviewed 15,851 pages of financial reports, including 135,843 separate expenditures and corporate records in 10 states, and conducted interviews with the nonprofits’ leaders and vendors. A lawyer for the active groups told the Times that “all four had faced ‘tax-exempt compliance examinations’ by the IRS and that an IRS representative had told him…that the groups would face no penalties, but that [it] had not yet issued a decision in writing.”

The Times reported that the groups claim “they simply believed in helping politicians indirectly—not by giving them money or buying them ads or mentioning their names, but by obliquely raising issues that could shift voters their way. [The] calls were not a means to an end in the work of influencing elections. They were the work itself.”

Even while the tax code lacks specificity over what limits are placed on Section 527 tax-exempt organizations, “these nonprofits still seemed to stretch it,” the Times noted. “Indirect expenses have to support direct expenses,” Ellen Aprill, a professor at Loyola Law School who has studied 527 groups, told the Times. “Why are you spending money fundraising if you don’t have any candidate you’re going to use it for?”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/ Dobrila Vignjevic)