Accountable.US

Overview

Accountable.US is a Washington, D.C. watchdog group that built its reputation on a distinctive tactic: turning campaign-finance and tax records into weapons-grade opposition research, then handing the results to Congress and the press. Its biggest hit was the September 18, 2025 “American Sell-Out” report, which accused the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture of selling governance tokens to buyers linked to North Korea, Iran, and a sanctioned Russian network — findings that Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed cited on November 17, 2025, in a letter demanding that the Treasury and Justice Departments investigate the firm’s compliance controls (Standing Record; CoinTelegraph). What makes the episode unusual is what happened next: the report’s flagship North Korea allegation was publicly dismantled by independent blockchain researchers, who traced it to a joke memecoin contract that automatically routed tokens from an address merely labeled “Lazarus” — and whose identification led World Liberty to freeze an innocent user’s roughly $95,000 in tokens (CoinTelegraph). The group describes itself as a nonpartisan 501(c)(3); NPR has described it as “a progressive nonprofit watchdog organization that monitors financial flows of right-wing organizations” (Accountable.US; NPR).

The “American Sell-Out” report

The report’s method was on-chain analysis: following the blockchain trail of World Liberty’s WLFI token buyers. Accountable.US alleged the firm had sold tokens to buyers whose wallets showed prior transaction links to sanctioned or high-risk networks (Standing Record). Its cited specifics included a wallet that purchased roughly 3,468 WLFI tokens in October 2024 with a history of transacting on Nobitex, Iran’s largest crypto exchange, and a wallet that bought more than 10,000 WLFI tokens after transacting with A7A5, a ruble-backed token whose issuer the U.S. Treasury’s OFAC designated in August 2025 over sanctions evasion (Standing Record). Related coverage of the report added the trader Shryder.eth, who bought 600,000 WLFI tokens on Inauguration Day — January 20, 2025 — and a finding that at least 62 WLFI buyers had previously used Tornado Cash, the crypto mixer sanctioned over money laundering (Bitcoin.com). The report also acknowledged that World Liberty eventually blocked 272 wallets, with five blacklisted for high-risk exposure — but only after the initial sales (Bitcoin.com).

The Lazarus Group claim was the report’s most explosive and its most fragile. Accountable.US flagged a wallet it linked to North Korea’s state-backed hacking operation; blockchain researcher Nick Bax of Ump.eth reviewed the transactions and concluded they were false positives — a joke memecoin contract called Dream Cash automatically routed tokens from an address labeled as Lazarus to anyone who claimed them, and an independent user had claimed the tokens as a joke, not as a transaction with North Korea (CoinTelegraph). MetaMask security lead Taylor Monahan likewise disputed the finding (Standing Record). As Bax noted, the fallout was not abstract: “Shryder wasn’t just falsely accused of being a DPRK hacker; it appears his big bag WLFI tokens (~$95k) got frozen as a result of this false positive” (CoinTelegraph).

The political consequence landed anyway. In their November 17, 2025 letter to Attorney General Pamela Bondi and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Warren and Reed cited the Accountable.US findings in asking for an investigation of WLFI’s compliance controls and national-security exposure, warning that the sales “gave adversaries a seat at the table” by granting governance rights in the protocol (Standing Record; CoinTelegraph). World Liberty denied wrongdoing, telling CNBC it performed “rigorous AML/KYC checks” on all presale buyers and rejected millions of dollars from those who failed screening, and it characterized its September 2025 wallet freezes as a response to third-party security lapses — phishing attacks and exposed seed phrases — unrelated to its smart-contract security (CoinTelegraph; Standing Record). All of the report’s claims remain allegations, not adjudicated findings.

The Epoch Times IRS complaint

A year earlier, the group showed the other half of its playbook: forensic accounting. On June 13, 2024, Accountable.US filed a complaint with the IRS asking it to investigate the Epoch Public Foundation and The Epoch Times Association — the nonprofit arms of the right-wing Epoch Times media empire — for potentially false or fraudulent information on their Forms 990 (Accountable.US). NPR, which had been alerted to the irregularities by Accountable.US itself, reported that the group hoped to trigger a civil investigation of the organizations’ 2021 and 2022 returns; executive director Tony Carrk told NPR his team had already started examining the filings before the money-laundering charges against the outlet’s CFO became public (NPR). (One honest wrinkle: the complaint’s opening paragraph asks for an investigation of tax years 2020 and 2021, while its detailed allegations and conclusion concern fiscal years 2021 and 2022.)

The complaint reads like a ledger autopsy. For fiscal year 2021, it alleges that The Epoch Times Association reported making a $4,678,292 general-support cash grant to the foundation — but the foundation did not report receiving any revenue from a related organization that year, instead reporting $11,992,297 from other sources and skipping Schedule B, the schedule that discloses major donors (Accountable.US). The foundation also reported owing the association an $11,590,700 liability while reporting no transactions with related organizations, and ended the year with $20,991,555 in assets — all in non-interest-bearing cash — against just $11,992,297 in reported revenue, with $20,586,627 owed to related organizations New Tang Dynasty and the association (Accountable.US). For fiscal year 2022, the pattern repeated: the association reported an $11,062,919 grant to the foundation while reporting no related-organization transactions beyond shared employees, and the foundation reported only $3,638,266 from non-related sources — again with no Schedule B, despite the association’s contributions far exceeding the $5,000 and 2%-of-revenue thresholds that trigger the filing requirement (Accountable.US).

The complaint’s sharpest passage concerns who signed the numbers. Weidong “Bill” Guan — indicted on June 3, 2024, in an alleged $67 million-plus money-laundering scheme — served as treasurer and director of the foundation and chief financial officer of the association, and is listed as the signatory on both organizations’ 2022 returns and the foundation’s 2021 return (Accountable.US; NPR). Because neither organization reported using a paid preparer, the complaint argues, Guan appears to have prepared the returns himself as well as signed them (Accountable.US). The complaint cites United States v. Guan, Case No. 1:24-cr-00322-VM, in the Southern District of New York, filed May 23, 2024 (Accountable.US). Whether the IRS acted on the complaint has not been publicly reported.

The American Democracy Scorecard

The group’s other signature project targeted not tax forms but political spending. In September 2022, Accountable.US unveiled the American Democracy Scorecard, grading the top 100 Fortune 500 companies on 14 criteria — their pro-democracy statements, the transparency of their political-spending disclosures, PAC donations to lawmakers who opposed voting-rights legislation, backed objections to certifying the 2020 election, or opposed the January 6 commission, and contributions to state officials backing voter-suppression measures or 2020 election audits (Fast Company). The verdict was unsparing: two-thirds of the companies received failing marks. AT&T was the lowest scorer, followed by Verizon, with Charter Communications and Comcast also in the bottom ten — making telecommunications the worst-ranked industry (Fast Company). Home Depot emerged as the top corporate donor to federal lawmakers who voted to overturn the 2020 election, contributing more than $350,000 to that group (Fast Company).

The scorecard’s data told a story of corporate promises quietly abandoned: 33 of the 50 companies that had paused political giving to election objectors after January 6 eventually resumed it, and the totals included $6.2 million to state legislators backing restrictive voting laws, $19.2 million to federal lawmakers who opposed forming the January 6 commission, and $5.7 million to members of Congress who voted to overturn the election (Fast Company). Then-president Kyle Herrig wrote directly to CEOs — including AT&T’s John Stankey — urging them to align their actions with their stated values, while the group planned a six-figure digital media campaign aimed at executives, elected officials, and business-school students (Fast Company).

What the organization is

Accountable.US presents itself as a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) whose investigations expose conflicts of interest and special-interest influence, with findings shared with the media, the public, policymakers, and allies in real time (Accountable.US). Leadership data points are sparse and dated: Kyle Herrig was president in 2022, Tony Carrk was executive director in June 2024, and Caroline Ciccone signed the group’s June 2024 IRS complaint as president (Fast Company; NPR; Accountable.US).

What this profile does not claim

This profile presents all of Accountable.US’s investigative findings as the organization’s allegations, never as proven facts — including the “American Sell-Out” claims against World Liberty Financial, which the company denies, and the Lazarus Group allegation, which independent researchers have credibly disputed as a false positive. It does not state whether the IRS acted on the June 2024 Epoch complaint, or whether the Treasury or Justice Department acted on the Warren/Reed letter; neither outcome has been publicly reported. It does not name a current president or executive director, because no fully-read source verified who holds those roles now — only the 2022 and 2024 data points. It flags, without resolving, the date-range mismatch inside the IRS complaint itself. And it does not assert the group’s funding sources; a claim that the New Enterprise Fund donated $1.4 million appeared only in a garbled syndicated article and was not verified.