WASHINGTON -- A television ad sponsored by the advocacy arm of the National Federation of Independent Business featured a small-business owner in Arkansas frustrated at what he said were the higher bills he had seen since the Obama administration's health care plan went into effect -- and pointing blame at Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat considered one of the most vulnerable incumbents facing re-election this fall.
But the largest chunk of the money donated to the nonprofit group's advocacy came not from small-business owners but rather from health insurance companies trying to repeal a health care tax, the most recently available federal tax records show.
The largely hidden role of the for-profit health insurers highlights the increasingly confusing world of campaign finance, as nonprofit groups such as the National Federation of Independent Business and its Voice of Free Enterprise program can keep their donor lists secret and then present their carefully fashioned message, financed in large part by big business, as if it is coming from, perhaps, a more sympathetic voice.
"If people who see this ad have no idea who is actually bankrolling it, they are in effect being misinformed," said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit that tracks the influence of money in politics.
The Arkansas television advertisement, run in December, featured John Parke, chief operating officer of Democrat Printing and Lithographing Co. in Little Rock, a 143-year-old, family-run company.
"We are a small business that has been part of the central Arkansas community for four generations," Parke says in the ad, paid for by Voice of Free Enterprise, which features scenes of worn-out printing presses and laborers hard at work. "What Obamacare means for Arkansas small businesses is tough choices, the mandates, the increased costs, the increased taxes."
But tax records filed late last year by the group show $1.593 million of the organization's $4.9 million in revenue came from an anonymous donor in 2012, the largest single contribution.
That is the exact amount that America's Health Insurance Plans, a trade association run by top executives from companies including Aetna and United Health Care, lists as having spent on "advocacy organizations as part of its advocacy efforts on issues associated with reform of the nation's health care system." The tax return prepared separately by America's Health Insurance Plans does not disclose that it donated the money to, or at least spent it in collaboration with, the Voice of Free Enterprise.
But a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans confirmed that is where the money went. Brendan Buck noted that the health insurers' group issued a news release in 2011, when it decided to team up with the National Federation of Independent Business to raise concerns about the cost associated with health care.
For the viewers of the television advertisement in Arkansas, there would be no way to know that the message was actually paid for in part by health insurance companies, who are opposed to a tax on health care premiums that will cost insurers roughly $100 billion over the next decade.
Parke, who said he is a member of the National Federation of Independent Business, said he was not told of the insurance companies' involvement but that he should have been.
"It is relevant to understanding who is sponsoring the message," he said.
Parke also is the treasurer of the Republican Party of Arkansas and ran unsuccessfully against David Sanders for the party's nomination for the House of Representatives District 31 seat in 2010.
He said Friday that he didn't know which part of the federal health care law caused the premiums for his company, which has a little more than 100 employees, to increase in January. He said he was told by his insurance agent that the increase was "because of Obamacare."
He said he wasn't sure if he would have agreed to appear in the ad if he had known it was sponsored in part by insurance companies.
"I probably would have given it more consideration," he said.
Another major donor to the Voice of Free Enterprise campaign, a comparison of multiple federal tax records shows, was Freedom Partners, a group founded by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire corporate executives and owners of the Kansas-based Koch Industries, who have been vocal critics of the Obama administration.
Kipp Maloney, executive director of Voice of Free Enterprise, did not dispute that several large contributions came from organizations with ties to large corporations.
Using that money, Voice of Free Enterprise has run a public-relations campaign it calls Stop the HIT, short for Health Insurance Tax, and helped pay for the television campaign in Arkansas. The organization also made outside expenditures to help Republican congressional candidates through media buys or other election-related spending in the last election cycle, among other initiatives.
"Everything we put out is squarely focused on the small-business owner, their employees and the issues they face," Maloney said. "I don't know how we could be confused with an organization fronting for some other groups."
The vast majority of donors are small-business owners, even if a handful of very large donations make up a large share of its overall budget, Maloney said.
The National Federation of Independent Business has a complicated legal structure: It has at least five separate nonprofit groups through which it moves money; at times, money is donated to one of the divisions but is then transferred and spent by another on an apparent political cause.
The federation calls the advertisements run in Arkansas "issue ads" meaning they are not explicitly political, and so would not affect the group's status as a nonprofit, even though the ads clearly point a finger at Pryor.
The Internal Revenue Service this year considered changing the way political activity by such nonprofits is defined -- to attempt to impose greater limits on groups that do not need to disclose where they get their money. But after protests by both conservative and liberal nonprofits, that effort was put on hold.
"I think it's unfortunate that new rules have been delayed," said Paul Ryan, senior counsel with the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit watchdog that has pushed for the new rules. "It allows groups like this to be used and abused and get around campaign finance and tax law disclosure requirements."
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Lipton of The New York Times and by Andy Davis of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
A Section on 07/26/2014