Meanwhile, ProPublica reports that Skip Gates is having to file an amended tax return with the IRS because of misstatements by his Inkwell Foundation.

A charity headed by star Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is filing an amended 2007 report to the Internal Revenue Service because $11,000 it paid to foundation officers as compensation was mischaracterized as being for research grants.

One $10,000 grant was to Gates’ assistant, Joanne Kendall, well-known to many at Harvard (Kendall is listed as the foundation’s treasurer).

Gates, a member of ProPublica’s board of directors, said Monday that the award to Kendall was actually payment for doing administrative work for Inkwell and not, as Inkwell’s IRS 990 form states, a research grant.

A foundation giving a grant to its own treasurer? Surely tax law prohibits that. And really, how could a foundation treasurer sign off on a grant to herself?

Another $1000 paid to foundation secretary Abby Wolf was also for administrative work, rather than research.

For a foundation that doesn’t seem to do anything, Inkwell sure has a lot of administrative work.

What motive would Gates have for mischaracterizing these payments?

Well, they could be one way of throwing more money at people who work for him than Harvard was willing to give them.

But more likely, the “grants” were intended to give the appearance that the foundation was actually doing something, and to help Inkwell maintain its tax-exempt status.

As part of maintaining their tax-exempt status, foundations have to file annual reports to the IRS showing where their money goes, separating program expenses from administrative overhead…..

By reclassifying the payments to Kendall and Wolf, administrative expenses will constitute almost 40 percent of Inkwell’s 2007 spending instead of less than one percent.

And what about the foundation’s largest actual grant, $6000?

That went to Angela DeLeon, who is also…wait for it…Gates’ fiancee.

ProPublica describes Inkwell thusly:

Inkwell was started by Gates in 2005 to support programs and research on African and African-American literature, art, history and culture.

ProPublica seems to have gotten that description from Gates, but it’s a careful revision of the historical record. Inkwell’s original purpose was entirely different.

The foundation’s original purpose: to give a portion of the profits Gates was making off DNA testing to public schools.

Its story has been more fully reported on this blog—the post was called “Skip Gates’ Bogus Cause“—and in Alex Beam’s Boston Globe column—but let me sum up.

Inkwell’s original press release said Inkwell would be…

… dedicated to reforming the teaching of science and history in inner city schools using genetic and genealogical ancestry tracing.

Which, to me, was a bit like Microsoft giving away Windows to public schools and libraries so that those schools and libraries would continue to buy Microsoft products in future years.

Except, it turned out, the foundation never gave any money away, and at the time Beam and I wrote about it, seemed merely a shell intended to earn Gates some good PR in connection with the DNA racket. When the media first wrote about Inkwell, no one even seemed to realize that the foundation only existed on paper, and that it was domiciled in Gates’ house.

And until Beam’s column, Inkwell had never filed the annual paperwork Massachusetts requires of tax-free organizations.

So let’s recap. Gates started a foundation with the ostensible purpose of promoting science teaching about DNA and genetics to, presumably, African-American kids in public schools.

Gates gets great publicity from this announcement. But a couple years later, it’s revealed that the foundation hasn’t actually given any money away.

Then, a year after that, it’s revealed that the foundation has given money away: to Gates’ assistants, his fiancee, and other of his friends, including professor Evelyn Higginbotham, a foundation board member who received a $500 payment.

Meaning that Gates has set up a non-profit corporation to funnel profits from DNA testing to his friends and fiancee, and those profits are classified as “grants” rather than income.

I’m not a tax lawyer, but if I were, I think I’d raise an eyebrow over that.