At first glance, the Westchester Peace Action Committee Foundation (WESPAC) seems unremarkable: a sleepy community organization with just one part-time staffer, a modest office in White Plains, N.Y., and little by way of public events.
But the group raked in $2.4 million in 2022—more than three times as much as it raised in 2020, according to public tax filings. The charity in 2022 spent nearly $1.5 million on “office expenses,” a category the IRS says should only cover “supplies, telephone, postage.”
“This is all very strange, it seems like they’re trying to obfuscate what they’re really spending their money on,” said former IRS tax law specialist and nonprofit consultant Patrick Sternal. “This doesn’t look like a particularly transparent organization, this filing raises all sorts of questions.”
A new lawsuit could point to some answers.
In May, families of the victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel filed suit against National Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, both of which, the plaintiffs allege, are “collaborators and propagandists for Hamas.” Buried in the suit is a brief reference to WESPAC, which the suit names as the “official ‘fiscal sponsor'” of National Students for Justice in Palestine.
“The financial interactions between WESPAC and its anti-Israel clientele is intentionally opaque to largely shield from public view the flow of funds between and among them,” the lawsuit reads.
Fiscal sponsorships are IRS-designated arrangements in which parent organizations accept donations on behalf of their subsidiaries. Legally speaking, there is no distinction between WESPAC and National Students for Justice in Palestine. If the latter is indeed proven to be a Hamas collaborator, the former would be as well.
The IRS created the “fiscal sponsorship” designation so that established charities could help incubate new initiatives that would spin off into their own independent organizations after a certain period of time. But in recent years, fiscal sponsorships have become a critical tool for left-wing activists and donors such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar to quickly mobilize “grassroots” campaigns on hot-button issues while hiding donors behind the causes.
For decades, WESPAC’s fiscal sponsorship has helped it to avoid scrutiny leveled at similar groups. According to its annual tax filings, WESPAC is just a small charity devoted to “current affairs education.” The group has even managed to remain under the radar as fiscal sponsorships connected to the left-wing Tides Foundation have been linked to a number of illegal protests.
Hellbound and Down 