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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
McLaughlin, Thomas A.
Streetsmart financial basics for nonprofit managers / Thomas A. McLaughlin.
Fourth Edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2016. | Revised edition of the author's Streetsmart financial basics for nonprofit managers, 2009. | Includes index.
LCCN 2015042429 (print) | LCCN 2015047242 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119061151 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781119061274 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119061328 (epub)
LCSH: Nonprofit organizations–Finance. | Nonprofit organizations–Accounting.
Classification: LCC HG4027.65 .M35 2016 (print) | LCC HG4027.65 (ebook) | DDC 658.15—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042429
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Illustration: Alexander Chernyakov /iStockphoto
To Gail, Paul, and Emily
Over the past three decades, the nonprofit sector has grown at an astonishing pace. Today, there are more than 1.1 million nonprofit public charities and about 380,000 other types of nonprofit entities. The sector is beginning to figure prominently in public conversations as an acknowledged source of innovation and solutions to various social issues, especially in areas where government at all levels was formerly more active. This trend seems likely to continue and even accelerate in the years to come.
With greater prominence and more widespread acceptance come greater attention and more scrutiny. Nonprofit management is becoming a recognized specialty, and there is a growing recognition that nonprofit financial management is not just for-profit financial management with a different name. The number of individuals and entities specializing in nonprofit financial management is growing as well.
With this growth in numbers comes a comparable growth in the demand for sophisticated management. The problem is that few nonprofit managers have any formal training in financial management. Almost everything they know is from on-the-job training, with a liberal amount of assumptions and conventional wisdom that may or may not be helpful. In some cases, these managers can rely on native instinct and clarity of thought, but most often they simply wing it and hope for the best.
Nonprofit organizations—and the users and funders of their services—deserve better, and they are getting it. It is not much of a stretch to say that the increased emphasis on financial management in nonprofits reflects a laudable striving for greater accountability. No longer is it enough just for one's financial records to be in order; one must be able to demonstrate good financial systems in order to meet all the other rising demands on today's nonprofit.
In my work as a nonprofit management consultant and nonprofit board member, I continue to find a widespread hunger for practical, immediately helpful financial information. That was the initial stimulus for this book, and it remains so today.
In this volume, I tend to steer away from technical compliance-related matters, for two reasons. First, others can cover financial compliance subjects better than I. And, second, my vision of financial management goes far beyond simple compliance to a stage that I fervently hope will be characterized by thoughtful, creative, and persistent management actions.
To support those who share my vision, I have tried to make this book as practical as possible. For example, most of my financial calculations and many examples are based on the IRS Form 990, the nonprofit tax return. By using the only common financial reporting form, I hope to bridge the gaps between different types of nonprofit organizations so that the content will work equally well for a broad audience.
In recent years, I have seen a growing interest in the American nonprofit sector by people from other countries. From conversations with my consulting and academic colleagues, I know I am not alone. Foreign students and managers face the double challenge of learning financial concepts while also familiarizing themselves with cultural matters that are uniquely American. This is why I added an appendix again in this version that is designed to be a kind of cultural primer on practices, institutions, and policies that most Americans take for granted but that would be stumbling blocks to non-Americans' understanding.
As with the first edition, this book is not intended to be primarily a textbook. There are hundreds of thousands of people involved with nonprofits who need to know about financial management but who don't need another textbook in their lives. It is to them that I speak through these pages. At the same time, I have been flattered that many professors and academic programs throughout the country have adopted the book for use in the classroom, and I thank them. I can only hope that their students do, too.
As a rookie executive director many years ago, I never dreamed that I might one day write a book that so many would find useful. Mainly, I was consumed with trying to figure out what seemed like a gargantuan task rapidly enough to avoid appearing foolish. In some very real ways, this book is a record of my personal journey through a sometimes confusing topic. The existence of this fourth edition is pleasing validation that many people have found my approach to nonprofit financial management helpful. I hope only that that will continue to be the case.
—Tom McLaughlin
November 2015
Many people helped with one or more editions of this book. I particularly want to thank Allwyn Baptist, Becky J. Cerio, Robert Cowden, Dennis Fusco, Jim Gambon, Robert Gardiner, Catherine Gill, Elizabeth Hart, John Joyce, Laura Kenney, Bill Levis, Marty McLaughlin, Jim Mecone, Clara Miller, Wayne Moss, James Nesbitt, David Orlinoff, Mary Plant, Joanne Sunshower, Shari Sankner, and Sherrell M. Smith. Catherine Gill at the Nonprofit Finance Fund supplied some of the vignettes. My editors at John Wiley & Sons, Marla Bobowick, Susan McDermott, and Matt Gilbert provided support, feedback, and guidance in one or more editions.
Throughout this book, a web icon indicates that you should go to the accompanying website for corresponding templates or examples. The website address is www.wiley.com/go/basics4E. Refer to Appendix C, “Using the Website,” for the table of contents and detailed instructions for use of these templates.
One of the distinguishing features of our legal and financial systems is that they have found a way to make something that no one can see or touch seem real—and therefore, it has become real. The high point of this accomplishment is that perfectly intelligent, normal people can find themselves debating the virtues of the behavior of this thing and even changing their own behaviors and choices because of its existence.
We are talking, of course, about the corporation. Even the word itself sounds substantial, and when various names or other identifiers get put in front of it, we accept the results easily. But the idea of a corporation is nothing more than a construct that gains substance and credibility in financial matters largely because we need it to do so. Our acceptance of the metaphor of a corporate structure is tangible evidence that we human beings yearn for predictability and consistency even when the entity itself exists only in our minds and in the ways that a corporate structure is said to behave.
We say all this because whatever corporate structures lack in tangible qualities they more than make up for via their widely accepted ways of indicating financial boundaries. As you will see later in this book, those boundaries can take on the nearly concrete feel of something that can seem to be virtually a physical presence.
The highest level of nonprofit management is the corporation that “owns” or runs the programs. The corporation is a statutory entity established by the legally sanctioned actions of one or more individuals. As a legally approved entity separate from its constituent individuals, the corporation has its own continuing existence. In legal theory, corporations are treated as distinct entities like individual people, and corporations have their own collection of responsibilities, liabilities, and powers.
Why a corporation? The answer is disarmingly simple: because it's easier for the rest of us. Corporations can be mentioned in the same legal breath as the individuals who use their services, work in them, or simply exist in the same state with them. All are on the same legal footing, in that respect. The complicated and narrower answer to the question has to do with a variety of practical considerations. For instance, revenue source regulations and political realities often nudge nonprofits in the direction of a specific type of organizational structure. Programs such as battered women's shelters almost of necessity start out as single-service corporations, while older and more established groups may have developed a multicorporate structure.
There are also liability laws to consider when operating different types of businesses. Nonprofit public charities traditionally have been granted generous protection from state liability laws, although that tendency is beginning to change. It's a tradition growing out of English common law that has been codified in many places around the country. Often there will be either an explicit limitation on suits or a prohibition altogether on the grounds that entities funded by the public at large ought not to be siphoning resources into private hands via lawsuits. Liability considerations alone are not normally strong enough to determine a corporate structure, but the more favorable liability climate for public charities is clear.
Like most for-profit businesses, nonprofit organizations must have a legally acceptable structure within which to operate. Nonprofit public charities are officially considered 501(c)(3) corporations. There are literally dozens of other structural choices in the IRS list of tax-exempt entity types, but this one is easily the best known. The official IRS list of these choices is reproduced in Exhibit 1.1 from IRS Publication 577.
This bloodless list of unsentimental choices obscures a central point. Corporate structures in the nonprofit world are chosen for many reasons, the primary ones being risk management, tax treatment, and the best available corporate fit for carrying out missions. The same kind of reasoning about structural choice takes place in for-profit entities. With such a large number of potential structural options, entrepreneurs—in the nonprofit sector or outside of it—would do well to mimic the guiding principle of good architecture: form follows function. Put simply, be as clear as one can possibly be in determining what one wishes to accomplish and then give some serious thought to the best structural choice available.
This area of structural choice for public-serving entities has seen unprecedented innovation recently. One of the most intriguing developments in the nonprofit sector has been the rise of alternative structural choices, such as low-profit limited liability companies (L3Cs) and benefit corporations (more about these and other choices will follow).
Programs are the most visible and best understood aspect of the nonprofit form of business organization and its chief means of carrying out its mission. Also called services, projects, clinics, divisions, departments, floors, or any one of a thousand other names, programs are the activities of the nonprofit organization.
Coming up with a fair and workable definition of a program is difficult. Here's an attempt: A program is a coherently packaged group of activities, usually associated with one or more specific locations, designed to accomplish a stated result.
Nonprofit organizations run all kinds of programs and often more than one. Day care centers offer infant care programs, environmental groups operate recycling systems, museums run art appreciation courses, and so forth. The two keys to understanding programs are that they generally have some coherent internal structure, and they appear as distinct choices to potential users.
In most nonprofit organizations, programs are like little businesses, with a structure reinforced by nonprofit accounting rules and with immense if largely unnoticed consequences for everything from compensation to organizational effectiveness. They represent a delegation of responsibility from the CEO, and so they are the engines of mission. It is at the program level that the organization's goals are accomplished or not; therefore, those in charge of programs carry heavy moral pressure to get the job done.
Notice the use of the word “moral” in the preceding sentence. Typically, the motivations of those who run nonprofit organizations are different from those who do the same thing in the for-profit world, and the motivations of program managers everywhere are often different still from their bosses. We'll explore some of those differing interests later. For the moment, we'll use the program as the smallest management unit of the nonprofit corporation.
If programs sometimes seem fuzzily defined, there is no such problem with corporate structure. Unlike other forms of business organization, a corporation does not exist until certain governmental authorities say it exists. For nonprofit corporations, the lead voice in the chorus is the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In matters having to do with nonprofit corporations, it is the IRS that giveth and the IRS that taketh away.
Corporations are organized according to the laws of individual states. Ordinarily, starting a corporation is as easy as filing the required paperwork and paying the necessary fees; in fact, that is how all corporations must start. But government at all levels reserves the right to tax the profits of a business. In order to get the government to waive its right to tax—to allow a corporation to be tax exempt—a would-be nonprofit corporation must show that it has been created and will be operated with certain purposes in mind. It must do so according to pre-established guidelines spelled out in the code. Then, it must wait for the IRS's decision on the application.
IRS acceptance of exempt status is the turning point. After this step, state government often must have its say about the organization's acceptability as a tax-exempt entity. Normally, state government is willing to follow the IRS's lead, so once the IRS has weighed in, it's usually pro forma thereafter.
In effect, the IRS considers all nonprofits to be taxable entities until they prove otherwise. The major thing that distinguishes a nonprofit from a for-profit corporation is that most nonprofits (including all charities) are not allowed to have shareholders with whom to share profits. Note that this is not a prohibition against profits, just against having shareholders with whom to share them. This is the reason why it is often said that the profits of a nonprofit are kept within the corporation—salaries, benefits, and perks notwithstanding.
In recent years, there has been growing interest in what are sometimes known as “hybrid” corporations. These entities combine the explicit profit making and ease of capital formation characteristic of for-profit corporations with the social responsibility of nonprofits. Social enterprise practitioners are particularly interested in hybrid corporations because they often must create a basis for social responsibility in a for-profit or manufacture ways to raise private equity (not donations) through a nonprofit. The compromises they must reach are unsatisfying or impractical, and that is what drives the search for a new form.
There is some precedent for these hybrid corporations, such as in England where the community interest company form was approved in 2004 or in the United States where well-known groups such as Newman's Own or Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream were among the first to mold traditional for-profits into social enterprises. Many nonprofits have been experimenting with for-profit-like structures and cultures. The difficulty is that these are one-of-a-kind ventures. Creative legal and financial advisors can often find ways to jerry-rig a structure that mimics a hybrid corporation, but until such options are well defined, well understood, and enshrined in law in all states, hybrid corporations will never really become widely accepted. This is the significance of the L3C form that first gained legal acceptance in 2008. This variation on the traditional limited liability corporation (LLC) is specifically intended to support social enterprise, and so it has become the first genuine prototype in hybrid structure.
Historically, Congress has disliked private foundations, which are a form of charitable organization, probably because of the abuses that occurred when they were first created. In 1969, the U.S. Congress laid the groundwork for what we now call private foundations. In the process of paying attention to private foundations, however, a curious thing happened. The IRS actually developed a much clearer and better developed sense of what a private foundation is than what a public charity is. Consequently, it essentially regards public charities as nonprofit corporations that are not private foundations. This is why the IRS letter granting tax-exempt public charity status says that the applicant is a tax-exempt corporation that is not a private foundation.
The driving force around which the determination of private foundation or public charity status revolves has nothing to do with public mission but rather is usually a product of that old-fashioned determinant, money and its control. Whereas a private foundation derives its initial or ongoing funding from limited private sources, regulators expect the charitable organization to get its funding from the public at large. For many public charities, that hurdle is set at one-third of total revenue, although in a few obscure legal cases that percentage could be lower.
It is not hard to infer the authorities' motivation here. Private foundations' sole source of revenue being a single individual or family gives the founders tremendous control over determining who gets the benefits of the tax-exempt activity. It could also lead to a temptation to abuse that power if not kept in check. By obliging public charities to derive a substantial chunk of their revenue from the public at large, Congress has virtually guaranteed that a public charity's management could never exercise the same degree of control.
So far it may seem as though the nonprofit organization's only choice about tax-exempt status is between private foundation and not a private foundation, but the range of choices is much broader than that. In fact, the familiar nonprofit public charity is only one of several possible options under which a nonprofit corporation can operate. In official IRS parlance, nonprofits are organized under Section 501(c) of the code. What all of these types of corporations have in common is that (1) they are exempt from federal and usually state corporate taxes and, in the case of public charities, (2) they are not private foundations. Significantly, only 501(c)(3) corporations—and a few others, under certain circumstances—can offer donors the right to deduct contributions from taxable income. The graph on pages 10 and 11 highlight some of the differences between nonprofit organizations. (See Exhibit 1.1.)
Exhibit 1.1 Form 990 Returns of 501(c)(3)–(9) Organizations: Balance Sheet and Income Statement Items, by Code Section, Tax Year 2012
| Item | Internal Revenue Code Section | ||||||
| 501(c)(3)[1] | 501(c)(4) | 501(c)(5) | 501(c)(6) | 501(c)(7) | 501(c)(8) | 501(c)(9) | |
| (1) | (2) | (3) | (4) | (5) | (6) | (7) | |
| Number of returns | 192,915 | 11,845 | 10,381 | 17,899 | 10,061 | 4,969 | 4,899 |
| Total assets | 3,266,580,329 | 111,996,674 | 34,906,701 | 72,871,828 | 25,696,376 | 135,180,892 | 213,141,693 |
| Cash—non-interest bearing | 83,820,056 | 5,082,544 | 2,698,036 | 5,005,839 | 1,646,656 | 517,777 | 3,588,331 |
| Savings and temporary cash investments | 201,196,619 | 9,730,354 | 6,783,280 | 10,978,229 | 1,838,562 | 4,948,650 | 18,419,967 |
| Pledges and grants receivable | 75,238,145 | 408,427 | 27,613 | 300,781 | 5,284 | *303 | 121,190 |
| Accounts receivable | 158,558,821 | 5,465,161 | 1,077,645 | 3,850,771 | 1,383,356 | 273,729 | 8,754,600 |
| Receivables from officers, etc. | 569,526 | 152,477 | *2,150 | 13,167 | 5,160 | 311 | 631 |
| Receivables from disqualified persons | 264,964 | 0 | 2 | *338 | 61 | 0 | 42,393 |
| Notes and loans receivables | 93,215,763 | 22,578,601 | 364,606 | 1,895,539 | 176,206 | 1,756,638 | 132,505 |
| Inventories for sale or use | 18,196,349 | 182,734 | 35,070 | 178,229 | 291,902 | 36,596 | 7,665 |
| Prepaid expenses and deferred charges | 24,116,352 | 902,303 | 125,073 | 845,784 | 221,045 | 83,131 | 268,189 |
| Land, buildings, and equipment (net) | 940,828,795 | 11,686,503 | 5,019,781 | 6,137,815 | 18,766,253 | 2,082,511 | 502,815 |
| Investments in public securities | 792,706,758 | 29,854,178 | 13,289,706 | 33,906,927 | 629,852 | 80,377,175 | 91,055,579 |
| Investments in other securities | 589,012,677 | 9,256,421 | 4,399,294 | 5,572,592 | 162,236 | 14,109,854 | 81,854,897 |
| Program-related investments | 55,979,762 | 10,020,360 | 131,602 | 1,449,520 | 58,592 | 12,490,146 | 860,995 |
| Intangible assets | 12,684,403 | 205,472 | 22,216 | 153,120 | 101,047 | *191,717 | 0 |
| Other assets | 220,191,337 | 6,471,140 | 930,629 | 2,583,176 | 410,163 | 18,312,354 | 7,531,937 |
| Total liabilities | 1,302,783,518 | 54,731,992 | 7,751,093 | 41,723,107 | 8,983,733 | 120,530,610 | 24,218,912 |
| Accounts payable and accrued expenses | 236,602,980 | 13,973,352 | 3,708,398 | 7,828,097 | 1,128,140 | 4,738,534 | 9,875,891 |
| Grants payable | 16,665,660 | 751,940 | 115,086 | 150,494 | *2,034 | *9,054 | 50,920 |
| Deferred revenue | 71,637,006 | 4,189,015 | 312,876 | 6,016,451 | 1,125,072 | 73,017 | 589,867 |
| Tax-exempt bond liabilities | 399,662,984 | 4,920,088 | *38 | 57,413 | *13,722 | *25,011 | 0 |
| Escrow account liability | 8,182,000 | 620,884 | 110,212 | 183,679 | 28,151 | 9,678 | 55,629 |
| Payables to officers, directors, etc. | 2,690,138 | *58,593 | *10,086 | 11,129 | 39,066 | 0 | 315 |
| Secured mortgages and notes payable | 187,925,088 | 11,303,035 | 925,885 | 3,363,196 | 5,187,508 | 171,600 | 44,551 |
| Unsecured notes and loans payable | 42,983,622 | 11,896,881 | 39,446 | 187,468 | 402,774 | *8,329 | 44,156 |
| Other liabilities | 336,434,038 | 7,018,204 | 2,529,065 | 23,925,179 | 1,057,267 | 115,495,388 | 13,557,584 |
| Total net assets | 1,963,796,811 | 57,264,682 | 27,155,608 | 31,148,721 | 16,712,643 | 14,650,282 | 188,922,781 |
| Total revenue | 1,726,300,540 | 93,256,311 | 23,147,289 | 41,831,798 | 12,756,586 | 18,781,109 | 138,727,323 |
| Total contributions, gifts and grants | 366,842,354 | 8,393,994 | 3,217,251 | 6,454,597 | 1,317,421 | 282,009 | 670,080 |
| Federated campaigns | 2,740,782 | *2,155 | 0 | *13,011 | *3,967 | *14,529 | 0 |
| Membership dues | 4,110,987 | 1,242,578 | 2,540,174 | 3,309,355 | 1,171,768 | 177,506 | *93,530 |
| Fundraising events | 7,680,228 | 51,775 | 14,849 | 14,603 | 17,508 | 17,830 | *42 |
| Related organizations | 18,800,463 | 259,764 | 88,292 | 212,120 | 6,903 | 23,457 | 121,957 |
| Government grants (contributions) | 153,671,682 | 1,604,458 | 132,996 | 1,700,147 | *3,489 | *5,112 | *17,863 |
| All other contributions, gifts, etc. | 179,838,212 | 5,233,263 | 440,940 | 1,205,361 | 113,786 | 43,574 | 436,688 |
| Program service revenue | 1,246,212,631 | 80,007,856 | 17,784,703 | 31,233,323 | 8,750,804 | 13,452,574 | 129,032,550 |
| Investment income | 31,241,692 | 1,061,786 | 591,890 | 1,055,411 | 37,167 | 3,482,064 | 4,556,453 |
| Tax-exempt bond proceeds | 147,631 | 424 | 0 | *1,167 | *83 | 34,915 | 16,861 |
| Royalties | 4,186,098 | 806,165 | 239,506 | 546,788 | 11,655 | 4,249 | 0 |
| Total net rental income | 3,512,268 | 232,982 | 104,653 | 53,526 | 48,339 | 26,516 | 257 |
| Net rent—Real estate | 3,412,655 | 230,040 | 104,794 | 53,290 | 42,261 | 24,190 | 257 |
| Gross rents | 7,252,729 | 327,536 | 216,916 | 197,460 | 102,976 | 42,219 | 11,212 |
| Rental expense | 3,840,074 | 97,496 | 112,122 | 144,170 | 60,715 | 18,029 | 10,955 |
| Net rent—Personal property | 99,613 | *2,942 | *-141 | *236 | 6,078 | *2,325 | 0 |
| Gross rents | 157,573 | *6,488 | *654 | *575 | 7,352 | *2,843 | 0 |
| Rental expense | 57,960 | *3,546 | *795 | *339 | *1,275 | 518 | 0 |
| Total net gain from sales of assets | 40,488,158 | 477,742 | 220,051 | 656,150 | 20,966 | -18,459 | 3,369,204 |
| Net gain from sales—Securities | 35,891,151 | 424,414 | 210,657 | 578,017 | 26,123 | 89,913 | 3,018,647 |
| Gross sales | 707,754,043 | 15,333,893 | 10,044,907 | 13,562,869 | 184,358 | 38,844,033 | 419,964,848 |
| Sales expense | 671,862,892 | 14,909,479 | 9,834,250 | 12,984,852 | 158,234 | 38,754,121 | 416,946,202 |
| Net gain from sales—Other assets | 4,597,008 | 53,328 | 9,394 | 78,134 | -5,157 | -108,372 | 350,558 |
| Gross sales | 17,393,188 | 509,502 | 239,432 | 164,857 | 86,033 | 82,014 | 9,114,343 |
| Sales expense | 12,796,181 | 456,174 | 230,038 | 86,723 | 91,190 | 190,386 | 8,763,785 |
| Net fundraising income | 1,852,634 | 54,228 | 7,691 | 207,413 | 35,416 | 36,801 | *630 |
| Gross fundraising income | 6,072,330 | 239,274 | 47,895 | 499,111 | 96,831 | 99,251 | *1,643 |
| Fundraising expenses | 4,219,695 | 185,046 | 40,204 | 291,698 | 61,414 | 62,450 | *1,013 |
| Net gaming income | 315,555 | 91,337 | *382 | *659 | 30,956 | 133,818 | *65 |
| Gross income from gaming | 1,916,538 | 536,843 | *1,970 | *945 | 80,452 | 537,200 | *6,424 |
| Gaming expenses | 1,600,983 | 445,506 | *1,589 | *286 | 49,496 | 403,381 | *6,359 |
| Net income from sales of inventory | 6,438,373 | 127,430 | 17,650 | 224,743 | 2,064,237 | 158,879 | -2,266 |
| Gross sales of inventory | 15,062,314 | 507,339 | 67,421 | 400,421 | 3,899,031 | 522,560 | 21,515 |
| Cost of goods sold | 8,623,941 | 379,910 | 49,770 | 175,678 | 1,834,794 | 363,680 | 23,781 |
| Other revenue | 25,063,140 | 2,002,366 | 963,511 | 1,398,022 | 439,541 | 1,187,742 | 1,083,488 |
| Total expenses | 1,616,634,043 | 90,820,244 | 22,240,863 | 40,005,484 | 12,439,523 | 17,671,338 | 135,806,288 |
| Program services | 1,401,419,364 | 83,797,836 | [2] | [2] | [2] | [2] | [2] |
| Management and general | 197,519,756 | 6,576,139 | [2] | [2] | [2] | [2] | [2] |
| Fundraising | 17,694,923 | 446,269 | [2] | [2] | [2] | [2] | [2] |
| Excess of revenue over expenses (net) | 109,666,497 | 2,436,067 | 906,426 | 1,826,315 | 317,063 | 1,109,770 | 2,921,035 |
* Estimate should be used with caution because of the small number of sample returns on which it is based.
1 Excludes private foundations, most churches, and certain other types of religious organizations.
2 Not required to be reported.
NOTES: Data exclude most organizations with receipts less than $50,000. Detail may not add to totals because of rounding.
Source: IRS, Statistics of Income Division, Exempt Organizations (Except Private Foundations), July 2015.
There is a monster loose in nonprofit land. It is a monster few have seen but many can describe, summoned up from nightmares to give body to commonly held, nameless fears. It has the power to terrorize whole boards of directors, senior staffs, attorneys, accountants, managers, and donors. It is the monster called “loss of tax-exempt status.”
Like most monsters, this one's power comes not from what it does directly but from its ability to govern our thoughts and shape our actions in anticipation of encountering it. And it is in the latter dynamic that the uncritical mind is most vulnerable to the advice of those who would pretend to have glimpsed the beast.
Let us make the monster slink away into the night, discouraged by reality. According to the IRS, in many years, the total number of those organizations that lost their tax-exempt status is around 100. In 2007, the IRS revoked 116 tax-exempt statuses.
If this surprises you, it might be well to remember that the business of managing the tax responsibilities of tax-exempt organizations is, at least at their initialization, largely a matter of trust. The IRS trusts that organizations that say they are organized to benefit the public good will do just that, and because the only return that they file (Form 990) doesn't determine the amount of money the government gets paid in taxes, there is little reason to systematically review it the way personal and for-profit corporate returns are handled. To put it another way, there's little payoff for the IRS to go looking for trouble in this sector.
When trouble finds the IRS and results in these yearly hundred or so tax-exempt status revocations, it tends to fall disproportionately on groups that are not public charities. These organizations are social clubs, trade associations, fraternal organizations, and the like that enjoy tax-exempt status but are not considered public charities in the same mode as the more familiar hospitals and universities.
By far, the biggest reason for exempt-status revocation is that the corporations violated the prohibition against private inurement, meaning that they used their tax-exempt status to illegally enrich individuals connected with the organization in some way. Public charities also tend to lose their tax-exempt status for political work on behalf of individual candidates, a strictly prohibited activity. Another major reason for loss of tax-exempt status in all types of tax-exempt organizations is a group's receipt of an excessive amount of income from an unrelated trade or business.
Why should nonprofit board members care about IRS policy on tax-exempt status termination when so few organizations actually lose their privileged tax status? The answer to this question is rooted in the same reservoir of public trust and social spiritedness that gives rise to the privilege of tax exemption in the first place. All of these are ways in which a tax-exempt organization behaves like something it is not, particularly when it acts as a vehicle for private enrichment.
The vast majority of nonprofit leaders are ethical, committed individuals who need not worry about their actions even remotely endangering the organization's tax-exempt status. This is the greatest counterbalance to the tiny fraction that would exploit the public trust.
But a more compelling and far more subtle reason for understanding the real risks regarding loss of tax-exempt status is to be in control of one's own organization. By citing a danger that doesn't exist, presumed experts can exercise undue sway over the actions of a board or management team, insidiously discouraging the assumption of prudent risk or the exploration of innovative financial directions. Well-meaning advisors can work in monstrous ways.