Virginia’s once-No. 1 ranked high school handed over its curriculum, syllabi, and floor plans to Chinese Communist Party-linked organizations, while those organizations shelled out $3.6 million in tax-exempt donations to the school’s affiliated nonprofit.

Now, a new IRS complaint argues that nonprofit should be stripped of its tax-exempt status and forced to pay backtaxes for operating as a broker between Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School and Chinese entities.

Defending Education, the watchdog group that filed the complaint on Tuesday, hopes an IRS investigation can help answer what they think taxpayers in Northern Virginia deserve to know: How was an independent nonprofit organization authorized to share a legally separated public school’s intellectual property with China?

Thomas Jefferson High School was for years America’s top-ranking STEM school. The school’s affiliated nonprofit, the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund, was set up in 1999 as a fundraising arm to help bolster the school’s research capabilities and infrastructure.

Administrators, through the TJPF, received millions of dollars in purported donations from CCP-associated organizations, which advocacy group Defending Education claims were payment for the school’s intellectual property.

While receiving donations from Tsinghua University High School ($1.2 million from 2014 to 2018), the Ameson Foundation ($900,000 from 2014 to 2018), and Shirble HK ($1.5 million from 2016 to 2021),  TJ administrators oversaw and authorized the sharing of Thomas Jefferson’s curriculum, syllabi, and floor plans. China now operates dozens of TJHS replicas, which the country aptly branded the Thomas Schools.

“The facts strongly suggest that the Fund operated as a pass-through to sell the intellectual property of Thomas Jefferson High School (“TJ”)—America’s premier public high school and a legally distinct entity—to organizations linked to the Chinese government, in exchange for capital improvement funding for the school,” Defending Education said in its complaint. “The facts also suggest that the Fund entered business contracts with those same organizations to provide public employees to help them ‘clone’ TJ and establish identical state-sponsored schools in China. In return, the organizations provided additional funds that were allocated for renovations to TJ.”

National Review reported extensively on the CCP’s effort to clone TJHS last year. Fairfax County Public Schools, at the time, told NR that “the TJ Fund is a separate and independent 501(c)(3) entity, which is not overseen by FCPS.” Internal communications retrieved by Defending Education and shared with NR, however, revealed that TJPF employees regularly used taxpayer-funded tools, including “fcps.edu” email addresses.

Although TJPF has claimed to be “separate and independent” from the high school itself, TJPF staff have benefited from use of the high school’s taxpayer-funded office space, email accounts, administrative services, and other operational resources, Defending Education added in its complaint.

TJPF even hosted Chinese delegations “via [their] partnership[s],” a 2017 email said, during which TJHS staff were asked to lead sessions with, and host, Chinese officials.

“These funds were reported as ‘non-taxable’ or ‘charitable’ revenue in the organization’s 990s, raising a few troubling prospects. First, it seems that the Fund failed to pay taxes on business income that was unrelated to its stated ‘charitable’ purpose; second, the record indicates that the Fund diverted resources to third parties with no relationship to its ‘charitable’ mission; third, the Fund appears to have filed inaccurate tax-exempt reports with the IRS; and fourth, the Fund may have improperly used public resources for non-charitable purposes,” Defending Eduction’s Vice President Sarah Parshall Perry said. “We believe this evidently improper federal tax reporting is troubling enough to get the IRS’s attention, and we’re hoping to receive answers to these questions in due time.”

“American taxpayers deserve to know what they’re funding — especially when those funds could be used for partnerships in a nation overtly hostile to American interests,” Parshall Perry added.

TJHS is already under investigation by the Departments of Education and Justice for anti-Asian discrimination in its admissions policy.