Zeroing in on Rep. Steve Buyer’s questionable charity, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington today asked the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate whether Buyer “violated ethics rules by abusing a charity for private purposes and by trading legislative assistance for donations to the charity and a job for his son.”
The watchdog is also asking the IRS to probe whether the Indiana Republican’s Frontier Foundation “violated federal tax law by failing to operate for its stated public purpose of helping needy students and by doing little more than paying for the congressman to play golf with donors with interests before his committee.”
As we’ve documented, Buyer’s foundation raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry, often during luxury golf trips with the congressman and lobbyists. While Frontier was purportedly created to distribute scholarship money to needy Indiana students, it hasn’t awarded any such grants.
The CREW complaint cites TPMmuckraker’s story on Buyer’s son Ryan, who served as a director for Frontier and was hired by PhRMA as federal affairs manager.
CREW director Melanie Sloan said in a statement:
“Apparently, Rep. Buyer did not pay very close attention to the Jack Abramoff scandal. He seems to have missed the lesson that charities are not created to allow congressmen to play golf with their cronies. It is not quite stealing from orphans, but it is hard to imagine something much more callous than playing golf on the backs of poor students – at least one of whom surely could have gone to college on the money Frontier spent on Rep. Buyer’s golf trips.”
