By Brennen Jensen

Washington

Rep. Xavier Becerra, the California Democrat who has long questioned whether enough philanthropic dollars flow to charities that help minorities and the poor, told nonprofit leaders in a speech today that there was a pressing need “to look at the issues of waste, abuse, and corruption in the nonprofit world.”

“I’m more than willing to leave the issue to you but what I’m not willing to do is leave the issue altogether,” he told a conference in Washington sponsored by Independent Sector and the Internal Revenue Service.

The congressman did not outline any concrete steps he planned to take on the issues of nonprofit malfeasance or giving priorities, either legislatively or as a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee, but stressed that the challenges presented by the recession make it an even more important time to “find out who the bad apples are in the nonprofit world.”

Mr. Becerra praised philanthropic activity as “indispensable to American society.”

He acknowledged that he has been accused of “trying to run the nonprofit sector into the ground” for questioning how it spends the “tens of billions of dollars” diverted from the national treasury through charity tax exemptions.

But he says that his reputation is unfair — and that his motivation for examining philanthropic activity comes from the needs and concerns of his congressional district, a largely working-class section of Los Angeles that is home to many immigrant families.

“When I see a nonprofit organization paying its executives more money than the president of the United States, I don’t know if the folks in my district who are paying taxes on the $30,000 they make a year appreciate that,” he said. “When I find that most of the money in the nonprofit world doesn’t even end up helping the Latino, the African-American, the Asian-American families in my district who are trying to make their way up, but ends up mostly in the backyard of the folks who gave the money — and very few folks in my district can give a lot of money — then I wonder if we are getting the most out of those dollars by allowing tax-preferred treatment in the nonprofit world.”