The Clinton Foundation’s global health project, which has been scrutinized for taking foreign donations while Hilary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state, reversed course again Wednesday and announced that it would refile its taxes with the IRS.
The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) said the decision to file corrected tax returns for 2012 and 2013 was a response to “recent media interest.”
“As previously stated, the minor errors on the 2012 and 2013 CHAI 990s are immaterial and do not require refiling, yet in response to recent media interest in the forms, CHAI has decided to refile the returns in order to be fully transparent,” CHAI spokeswoman Maura Daley said in the statement.
The statement did not mention the Republican National Committee’s call a day earlier for an IRS audit of the charity.
The charity previously said it would file corrected tax returns but then decided not to.
The health care program takes donations from a slew of foreign entities and is best known for helping reduce the cost of HIV drugs in the developing world.
The unreported donations spurred questions about transparency and potential conflicts of interest while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. It also violated an agreement between Mrs. Clinton and President Obama to disclose donors to the White House.
The issue gained prominence amid Mrs. Clinton’s run for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, a contest in which she is the front-runner and heavily favored to win.
The decision by CHAI to refile its taxes came less than 24 hours after the RNC demanded an IRS audit of the health initiative.
“CHAI has failed to comply with federal tax rules or the ethics agreement the Clintons negotiated with the Obama administration, and re-filing erroneous returns 7 months after the fact amid political pressure is hardly a show of good faith,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement.
“The IRS should conduct an independent audit of CHAI’s finances to ensure that foreign government funding is fully accounted for so voters can get the full picture of the conflicts of interest that would come with a Clinton presidency,” he said.
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.