In its application, Project Veritas said it planned to pursue as many as a half-dozen journalism projects and conduct five two- to three-day training sessions for people interested in learning how to do such projects on their own. “I can’t tell you the secret sauce of it, but we do have a training method,” Mr. O’Keefe said. “There are many people learning this method and learning how to expose abusive power in creative ways.”

He said he would work as the organization’s “muckraker in chief,” for which he will be paid about $120,000 a year, according to the group’s application.

It raised $2,367 last year, according to the filing, and expects that figure to grow to $1.65 million over the next three years, though Mr. O’Keefe described that as “a sort of dream.” The group has hired a firm led by Richard Viguerie, a conservative strategist, to help it raise money.

Charities are constrained by law from participating in lobbying and political campaigns, and in response to a question posed by the I.R.S., Project Veritas specifically said it had no plans to lobby on behalf of specific legislation.“We’re designed to expose malfeasance, waste, fraud and corruption, to expose things for what they are,” Mr. O’Keefe said. “That’s not policy work, that’s educational work.”

Jeffrey S. Tenenbaum, a lawyer specializing in nonprofit matters, looked at the Project Veritas Web site and said he could see nothing that would cause the group to run afoul of the rules on politicking.

“Project Veritas’s leading stories have a certain direction in which they lean, and they could all be used by this organization and others for lobbying campaigns or even political campaign activities,” Mr. Tenenbaum said. “But in and of themselves, the things I saw on the Web site don’t do that.”

Paul Streckfus, a former I.R.S. official who edits The EO Journal, a newsletter that follows legal and accounting issues affecting nonprofit groups, noted that several such organizations lean to one side or the other of the political spectrum, including the Heritage Foundation, the Brookings Institution and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

“This new organization,” Mr. Streckfus said, “is not that different from any of those, it seems to me.”