This article pertains to some interesting discoveries made while investigating overlaps between the members of the Arizona state veterinary board and the directors of the Arizona Veterinary Medical Association. An initial review highly suggests serious omissions on the veterinary association's tax forms going back several years. An initial review of their Arizona Corporation Commission filings seems to suffer from the same material omissions. We're going to dig into that as time permits. We've also reported the AzVMA to the IRS Tax Exempt and Government Entities (TEGE) division for possibly failing to uphold the conditions of their nonprofit status.
Meanwhile, if you have copies of Arizona Veterinary News that contain complete Board of Directors information, we have a bounty out for them. I would assume that after each organizational election cycle they run an article introducing their beauty pageant winners. Get in touch and see if we can make you a reasonable cash offer.
Update: It appears that following our communication with the Arizona Veterinary Medical Association's attorney, Phillip Glasscock, the AzVMA finally reported its full Board of Directors on its latest IRS Form 990. Corrected versions of prior IRS Form 990 filings are not available on the IRS website nor have we been contacted by Mr. Glasscock with corrected versions of the prior Form 990s. If anything, the sudden change in the AzVMA's tax filings after nearly a decade leads us to believe our assessment—that the AzVMA concealed its Board of Directors on its IRS tax filings contrary to federal requirements.
Behind every highly-credentialed and politically-protected profession is a professional association lobbying on behalf of its members. The veterinary profession is no different. At the national level, the American Veterinary Medical Association lobbies on behalf of veterinarians, controls the credentialing process for veterinary programs, and opines on nearly every animal matter under the sun. Closer to home there are similar state associations, including the Arizona Veterinary Medical Association ("AzVMA").
Your pet may be your best friend, but the AzVMA is your veterinarian's best friend. Operating from a nondescript office on 100 West Coolidge that resembles a postapocalyptic Pizza Hut, their shadow stretches from the waves of Page to the barbed wire of Nogales. Whenever the government needs to know what to do about pet-related legislation or veterinary regulation, these guys are on the proverbial Batphone, always ready to answer the call and advise your elected officials. For example, during the 2017 sunset review process for the Arizona veterinary board, Arizona legislators wanted to know how well the system was working. Aside from veterinary board members or employees, the person they spoke to for advice was none other than AzVMA president Michael Sorum.
Perhaps most concerningly they also tend to get all up in your state veterinary board like some kind of invasive species. A gaggle of current and former members of the AzVMA Board of Directors tend to end up on the Board or one of its Invesigative Committees: C. Jeffery Brown, Nancy Bradley-Siemens, Cameron Dow, Christina Tran, Brian Sidaway, Michael Lent, and arguably the all-time contest winner, Brian Serbin. Some, like Julianne Miller and Matthew Goetz, put themselves out for various roles in the Investigative Committee but didn't land the job. Others have connections through business ties, such as Barbara Batke's emergency hospital business partnership with board member and veterinary technician Nikki Frost.
As you'll learn in our series of articles about Your Pet and the Administrative State (link), this kind of revolving-door relationship is actually a well-studied phenomenon in political science. It even has a name: Regulatory capture. The idea is that when a regulatory agency is set up, the people or companies being regulated have an incentive to get inside and take the place over; it's even easier for something like the veterinary board because the law requires a majority be veterinarians. However, when you see a significant overlap between the major regulator and the major lobbying organization, that's particularly ominous. Much like any other cancer, it happens on a continuum from bad to worse.
One of the things you can do in such a situation is determine the degree of overlap. In the best case, there are literally no connections at all. In the worst case, they're all the same people. In between, you have situations where there's perhaps a plurality but not a majority, or situations where the people in the agency look clean but have a lot of first-degree or second-degree friends and business partners right across on the other side. Fortunately for us, the AzVMA is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(6) membership-based nonprofit. As part of obtaining that status, they're required to submit a Form 990 for each tax year, and on that form there's supposed to be a list of their directors and key personnel. And as a nonprofit, you're supposed to be able to go in and request the last three years of their Form 990 more or less any time you want; the rest are available online from the IRS.
Obviously that's not a bad place to start, but randomly driving by and asking for their Form 990 isn't a great way to start a conversation. Sure, a lot of reputable organizations just publish them on their website, but this is the Arizona Veterinary Medical Association, and it never hurts to be polite. They may just not have a clue. I emailed the AzVMA and asked if they had any historical information on their board of directors membership. They post the current year's on their website, but there wasn't any historical information for prior years. They emailed back a short response asking me questions about what I planned to do with the information: "Who is the intended audience? What information besides the names of officers and directors will be included? Where will this be distributed?"
Strange behavior for our little ol' nonprofit, especially over information that's supposed to be public and published on their tax forms. I explained that the audience was the general public and that I was attempting to "study the level of interdependence between the commercial, professional, and regulatory systems responsible for veterinary care in the state." I went on to name several examples of overlap including the aforementioned Cameron Dow, Christina Tran, and Brian Serbin, also noting the time that somehow three directors (Cameron Dow, Julianne Miller, and Matthew Goetz) turned out to be the only candidates for an Investigative Committee position on the state board in 2019. I also offered to pay for back copies of the organization's newsletter, Arizona Veterinary News, if they would contain the information.
They sent back a reply thanking me for the information: "We will submit this request to our board for consideration and will be in contact if additional information is needed." Seems pretty high-level for a mere question about who used to be on the board of a nonprofit. I asked how long I should expect for a decision. Having arrived at the conclusion that they really didn't want people to know who was on their board, I also went ahead and asked for copies of the Form 990 under 26 U.S.C. 6104 (d). No response. I waited for four days and then sent a follow-up reminding them that they were required by law to respond in a reasonable period of time once the request has been made. I never heard anything from the AzVMA ever again.
What I did receive was a rather fun-sounding email from paralegal Caitlin Martin at Guidant Law with the subject line "52011.0002 - AzVMA - Confidential-Not for Publication." She informed me that her boss, the improbably-named Phillip Glasscock, represents the AzVMA and has asked her to respond to me. Rather than forking over the Form 990s for the past three years, she informed me that the AzVMA is a private not-for-profit organization primarily funded by membership dues. She then asked who I was, how many of us there were, whether we were students or reporters, and wanted a list of names and addresses so she could check to see who we really were: "Could you please explain this and provide us with the identities of the individuals and research organizations involved along with their phone, email, physical and mailing addresses for confirmation purposes?" She also wanted to know what we were planning to do with the information, the nature of our research, and whether we were part of the AzVMA.
Not only is it technically illegal to ask any of that with respect to a Form 990 inquiry, it's curious how much of that is a paraphrased version of what the anonymous AzVMA employee was also asking. Worse yet, I still didn't have those Form 990s. I responded back that I would not agree to participate in any confidential conversations. I also asked if Glasscock was now responsible for sending the Form 990 copies, as he had a legal requirement to send the copies in a timely manner regardless of the identity of the requester. The next day, Glasscock sent me copies of the Form 990 for 2020, 2019, and 2018. He also told me to direct all future inquiries regarding the AzVMA to him.
"They're tax forms, Jim, but not as we know them." There were some oddities about the forms Glasscock sent over, both in terms of what was there and what wasn't there. One of the things that wasn't there was the full list of the AzVMA's Board of Directors. They only listed their president, vice president, and secretary/treasurer, neglecting all the rest, and alternating their description between officers and directors depending on the tax year. On the 2018 version, they reported having 10 voting members despite listing only three people on their Board of Directors. For the successive years they reported only three, despite reporting no changes to their governing documents and their published Board of Directors having around a dozen people; it would only make sense if their elected directors actually had no role in running the show.
Other peculiarities included the fact that they reported that they were not a membership-based organization and had no members, yet self-identified correctly as a 503(c)(6) and reported hundreds of thousands of dollars in membership dues received on the same forms. Glasscock or one of his assistants even went to the trouble of sloppily redacting the EIN—something anyone could look up—from the forms using a blue marker. It was certainly some weird stuff.
I wondered if this could be the result of a mistake. I assumed that the AzVMA didn't get a lot of these requests, so perhaps there was a clerical error exporting the forms from their system. I couldn't imagine Glasscock, a prominent attorney as well as a former CPA, sending over bogus forms or wanting to be associated with lying to the IRS. I wrote up an email laying out the above concerns and sent it off to Glasscock. He, in turn, sent back a one-liner indicating he had forwarded the email to the Arizona Veterinary Medical Association's tax professionals. Hearing nothing back, I sent a follow-up email two weeks later in September 2022.
Glasscock informed me that there was no timeline for their review, stating that they were busy due to the September "tax season" and that many are busy at that time of year. In his words, "I imagine that if they discover any irregularities appropriate action will be taken if necessary." He also suggested, in a somewhat peculiar exchange, that I was still somehow subject to some kind of de facto confidentiality agreement, stating that under tort law I could still be held liable for publishing private facts. I sent back a response pointing out that literally everything I was asking for should be available to the public as a matter of law. It's not as if we're particularly concerned about, say, the sexual fetishes of the AzVMA directorship—unless it involves pets. Cattle would also qualify.
That was the last conversation I had with Phillip Glasscock. I briefly considered following up with their accounting firm, Gary Yeager and Associates, but suspected they'd simply call the AzVMA and point me back to Glasscock. Instead, I went ahead and downloaded some older Form 990 filings from the IRS to see how long this apparent strangeness has been going on. Those were also quite informative, having situations where directors weren't reported but otherwise-inconsequential people, some of whom appear to be related, were added instead. In one year the AzVMA reported it had more independent voting members than it had in total. We still had numbers hopping around all over the place. In some cases, it wasn't even a question of whether it was in accordance with the laws of taxation; the claims violated the laws of mathematics. It felt like somebody's kid was filling these out and sending them to the IRS.
As a curious anecdote, I began looking through the AzVMA's Arizona Corporation Commission filings to match them up. On their ACC filings, they would list an extra director or two that was missing from the IRS Form 990, but overall their filings there appeared to be incomplete as well. Yet if you went far back enough, 15 or 20 years, they actually sent a photocopy from the list of directors in their membership catalog. Without further context it appears that they just started sending in whatever they felt like. Why such a change in reporting occurred is unknown.
In case you were wondering, the corresponding association for real doctors, the Arizona Medical Association (ArMA), is also registered as a 501(c)(6) organization. Unlike its veterinary counterpart, it still reports everything on their Form 990s, including their regional directors, resident director, delegates, and even their delegate to the American Medical Association. On the other hand, they're real doctors.
For your reading pleasure we've uploaded copies of the Arizona Veterinary Medical Association's Form 990 for the past few years. I've put together a list of the more notable weirdness on each form along with a link to our copy. Those of you with a fondness for nonprofit tax accounting may find this particularly piquant.
For the 2020 version of IRS Form 990 (link):
For the 2019 version of IRS Form 990 (link):
For the 2018 version of IRS Form 990 (link and link):
For the 2017 version of IRS Form 990 (link):
For the 2016 version of IRS Form 990 (link):
For the 2015 version of IRS Form 990 (link):
Curiously, after our interactions with the Arizona Veterinary Medical Association and Phillip Glasscock, the AzVMA's tax filings started getting a lot more detailed. Starting with the AzVMA's 2021 IRS Form 990, they actually started reporting their full Board of Directors, and many of the other issues mentioned above also went away. Whether or not Glasscock relayed our concerns to Gary Yeager and Associates is unknown. We were never contacted by Glasscock or Gary Yeager and Associates to indicate that there were any problems with the IRS Form 990s we received, and corrected versions for prior years are not available on the IRS website.
To see what we meant about portions of their prior filings being bogus, take a look at the 2021 IRS Form 990 (link) and compare to prior years:
Certainly far more detailed than the conspicuous absences of the past decade. There's still some weirdness—for example, Emily Kane is reported as Executive Director, yet Mittie Williams also signed the tax form as Executive Director, so perhaps there's some personnel shifting going on down at the AzVMA.
Portions of the AzVMA's Schedule C relating to lobbying activities are also conspicuously blank; perhaps the AzVMA never lobbies politicians, but it's weird to have Susan Stevens listed as "Legislative Representative" on the AzVMA's own website if she never lobbies politicians. We'll have to wait for the next tax year to see if the AzVMA reports any lobbying against SB 1383, the Kavanagh malpractice bill, in 2023.
On the other hand, progress is progress, and at least now we'll have a clearer picture going forward about who's been part of the AzVMA and what they're up to in their other dealings. In the absence of corrected filings for the past, we'll just have to keep digging as we always do; your local veterinary establishment apparently likes things to remain murky.