Will it Take a Constitutional Miracle to Save the Parsonage Exclusion?
When we last blogged about the “seemingly innocuous five line tax benefit” in Section 107 of the Internal Revenue Code, a District Court judge in California was reviewing a complaint filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a nonprofit membership organization challenging this 90 year old provision.
Over the years, there have been a number of challenges to the parsonage tax exemption based on church and state separation constitutional grounds. In 2002, the Ninth Circuit sua sponte in Warren v. Commissioner asked the taxpayer and the government to brief the constitutional issue. The Court also asked Professor Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of Southern California to write an amicus brief, which concluded that the provision was unconstitutional.
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