The American Spectator

The criminals at ACORN, President Obama’s former employer, never stop ripping off American taxpayers.

The massive conglomerate ACORN Housing Corp. and its subsidiaries owe an eye-popping $162,813 in back taxes, according to the Nexis public records database.

The money is owed to the IRS, California, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, the city of Philadelphia, and the California counties of Fresno and Santa Clara. (A list of the 106 tax liens may be viewed here.)

Like a con artist trying to escape his past, ACORN Housing legally changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America Inc. (AHCOA).

ACORN Housing grew out of crime: trespassing and breaking and entering. It emerged from a 1982 squatting campaign in which ACORN built a squatters’ tent city behind the White House. Rampaging ACORN activists routinely break in and illegally occupy property already owned by others - and your tax dollars subsidize this criminal activity, as I write in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

ACORN Housing also helped to inflate the mortgage bubble. It bragged in a 1999 pamphlet that it had strong-armed banks into accepting food stamps and welfare as income on home loan applications.

Even now as America struggles with grave financial problems, the “new” ACORN Housing is going all out to get its hands on your hard-earned money.

AHCOA and its subsidiaries now have 32 “DUNS” numbers that have been officially registered. DUNS stands for Data Universal Numbering System.

Since 2003 the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has required applicants to obtain DUNS numbers in order to seek federal grants, so without them ACORN can’t feed at the public trough.

Posing as a new tax-exempt organization, ACORN Housing in San Antonio, Texas will receive an undisclosed percentage of a $619,696 federal grant. The subgrant comes from the federal National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling (NFMC) program.

The subgrant will probably be a fraction of the $6,184,168 in government grants ACORN Housing acknowledges receiving in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2010. (The $6,184,168 figure appears at page 9 of the group’s most recent publicly available tax return.)

Tax dollars given to ACORN Housing apparently don’t stay in ACORN Housing’s bank accounts for very long. Since 1997, ACORN Housing has shelled out more than $5.1 million in fees or grants to other entities in the ACORN network.

In 2008 alone, over 67 percent of gift and grants to ACORN Housing came from the federal government (and Bank of America). According to its tax returns, ACORN Housing gave $4,057,174 to the ACORN affiliate known as the American Institute for Social Justice, which has trained generations of Saul Alinsky-inspired organizers in the antisocial art of political agitation.

Investigators got wise to ACORN’s Enron-style accounting years ago. According to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee investigators, the group participates in a “shell-game of corporate financing that enables ACORN to commingle funds and potentially divert federal monies into partisan activities in violation of federal law.”

Meanwhile, it turns out that the $461,086 grant to AHCOA I reported on Monday was rescinded by President Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

This gets complicated, so bear with me.

After the article was published, HUD spokesman Jereon M. Brown contacted me by email. Brown acknowledged that the government’s USAspending.gov database referred to the money but said that a subsequent entry indicated that the award was canceled. “This amount was de-obligated and recovered,” he said. (The money was an unexpended portion of a block of funds from fiscal 2005, as detailed in the Federal Register.)

Through a quirk in the way the government reports on grants, even when a grant is withdrawn it is first reported in the database. After that, the cancellation of the grant is then reported in the same database. A separate item in the USAspending.gov database shows the rescission, Brown noted. The database “tracks dollars granted and it also tracks money recouped to provide an accurate snapshot to taxpayers,” he said.

This would appear to mean that in January when the Obama administration disallowed the $461,086 grant, it chose to obey the congressional ban on funding ACORN. That ban applies to monies appropriated in fiscal 2010 and previous fiscal years.

But just two months later, the Obama administration ignored the law when it provided a $79,819 grant to AHCOA. That grant came out of fiscal 2010 appropriations.

So in January funding AHCOA was a no-no, but March arrives and voila! - magically an Obama check gets cut.

What changed between January and March?

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