Opinion ID: 613010
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Orphan Sponsorship Program

Text: The third activity to which we turn our attention spanned all three years covered by Counts 3-5 and 8, and the alleged falsity was a matter of inaccurate disclosure rather than nondisclosure. Throughout the trial, the government argued that Mubayyid's failure to correct substantial misrepresentations in Care's Form 1023, through the attachments requested in Question 76, concealed the organization's support for and promotion of the mujahideen and jihad. In particular, the government alleged that Care's initial application for tax exemption was false because it failed to disclose to the IRS that Care's orphan sponsorship program focused on the orphans of martyrs. When asked to provide (a) a detailed description of the activity including its purpose,  Muntasser stated in the Form 1023 that Care would develop a program for orphan sponsorship in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Kashmir. Consistent with this representation, each of the Form 990s submitted by Mubayyid reported a substantial amount of cash assistance to orphans and widows. At trial, an expert for the government, who testified that he had reviewed the materials and solicitations associated with Care's orphan sponsorship program, opined that the purpose of the program's focus on the orphans of martyrs was to promote violent jihad: In the context of encouraging people to go and participate in fighting, it's important to remove anything that may prevent them from doing so, to remove disincentives. If a person who is inclined to go fight knows that if something should happen to him that his family would be taken care of, that removes the disincentive, and he's more likely to be able to go and fight. The witness also testified that he had seen similar, targeted solicitations used by organizations to support mujahideen activities many times. This focus was reflected in Care's website solicitation, which depicts a child to be sponsored as an orphan whose father died in defense of the faith. Because orphan sponsorship was, from Care's own perspective, a responsive answer to the call for activities on the Form 1023 and program services on the Form 990s, Mubayyid cannot sensibly deny that it was also an activity within the understood meaning of Question 76. Instead, as with the Al-Hussam newsletter, Mubayyid suggests that this activity had already been disclosed to the IRS on Care's Form 1023 and on Care's Form 990s for previous years. Although those forms did not reveal that the organization's orphan sponsorship focused on the children of martyred fighters, Mubayyid argues that, because the Form 1023 disclosed that the program would focus on orphans in war-torn countries, [i]t is no great inferential leap to conclude some of the widows and orphans became such because husbands and fathers died fighting. He also notes that the sole defense witness, a former IRS employee, testified that the program's focus would not have changed his opinion of Care's entitlement to tax exemption because widows and orphans are traditional objects of charitable aid. It's not significant for tax purposes how they became widows and orphans. The defense testimony was directly contradicted, however, by Robert Charnoff, the IRS employee who actually reviewed Care's application. Charnoff testified that he almost certainly would have denied Care's initial application for tax exemption if Care had disclosed that its orphan sponsorship program targeted children of martyred mujahideen because it's telling would-be fighters in foreign conflicts that if something happens to them, if they're killed say, this organization will provide funds to their orphans. So the net effect is it's an inducement for them to go to these areas of conflict. Likewise, Dawn Goldberg testified that evidence indicating that Care was soliciting people to go out and fight, or soliciting money to help fighters, could have led to the revocation of Care's tax exemption because one of the basic things [a 501(c)(3) charity] can't do is they can't do anything that's illegal or violate[s] public policy. The materiality to the IRS of the undisclosed focus of Care's orphan sponsorship program demonstrates why the simple listing of an orphan sponsorship program on the Form 1023 and prior Form 990s was not an adequate disclosure of the activity that was in fact being carried out by Care. To employ a counterfactual, if Care had initially conducted the unfocused orphan sponsorship program described in the Form 1023, but later elected to focus its donations on the orphans of martyrs, the testimony by Charnoff and Goldberg makes clear that the change in the program's focus should have been disclosed in response to Question 76 as a substantial modification. On the same basis, it would have been reasonable for the jury to have concluded that Care's Form 1023 described an orphan sponsorship activity that Care had never conducted, and hence Mubayyid was required to report Care's actual orphan sponsorship program in response to Question 76 as an ongoing activity that had never been accurately disclosed. The 990s themselves, though incomplete in the way we have described, provide evidence that the orphan sponsorship program was ongoing during each of the tax years in question. In addition, a government witness who volunteered for Care in 1996 and 1997 acknowledged that Care was actively raising money for orphan sponsorship during those years, and authenticated a flyer soliciting donations for orphans in language substantially similar to that contained on the website. In 2000 and 2001, as described above, the website featured the program in a way that made clear its true purpose. Although there was no direct testimony or record evidence confirming the program's operation in 1999, the other evidence permits the reasonable inference that it was an ongoing activity. We thus conclude that the government presented sufficient evidence from which a reasonable jury could have found that, in response to Question 76 on Care's Form 990s, Mubayyid willfully failed to disclose at least one reportable activity that occurred in each of the 1997, 1999, and 2000 tax years. Any arguable ambiguity in the temporal scope of Question 76 could not, therefore, have precluded Mubayyid's conviction for making a false statement; Mubayyid's answers would have been false even under the interpretation of the question consistent with his claimed understanding. For the foregoing reasons, we affirm Mubayyid's convictions on Counts 3, 4, and 5, for filing false tax returns in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7206(1), and his conviction on Count 8, for corruptly endeavoring to obstruct the administration of the Internal Revenue laws in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7212(a).