The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Thursday the start of a multi-year advertising and marketing campaign aimed at showing the public and politicians success stories from the U.S. government’s spending on global health.

Cynthia Lewis, a senior program officer for the Seattle foundation, says the Gateses want to resolve what they believe is a disconnect between the public’s perception of federal spending and a much more optimistic reality.

“The more you talk to Americans, the more you understand that they don’t know where their money has gone, let alone that any of it has resulted in successful outcomes and that there’s been real progress in saving lives and empowering lives,” Ms. Lewis says.

The Living Proof Project, as the effort is being called, includes:

• A Web site with videos, photos, interactive graphics, and personal profiles of people who have benefitted from...

More than a quarter of the grant money awarded last year by donor-advised funds held at community foundations supported basic social services, such as hunger-relief and health-care programs, according to a new survey.

And the survey, conducted by the Council on Foundations in time for its annual lobbying event this week, Foundations on the Hill, found that despite the drop in the value of assets at many community foundations, more than half the grant makers expect giving from donor-advised funds in 2009 to stay the same or grow from last year.

“Our message from this survey and to the hill is that donor-advised funds are doing their part to address critical human needs in these tough economic times, and that people count on them,” says Sigurd Nilsen, director of policy research and analysis at the Council on Foundations, in Arlington, Va.

The findings are based on responses from 26...

The IRS has ruled that a local chapter of a national nonprofit group violated the prohibition against politicking by including the political-campaign materials of an affiliated advocacy group on its Web site, even though the materials appeared on discrete pages and the advocacy group paid all associated costs.

Marcus S. Owens, a Washington lawyer specializing in nonprofit issues, says the ruling ignores critical Supreme Court and appeals-court decisions that say charities can wall off the political activities of their related advocacy groups through such means as cost-sharing.

“The IRS set out a sweeping position here, and provides no boundaries for its analysis,” says Mr. Owens, who is the former chief of the IRS’s tax-exempt division.

He says, for example, that if the IRS bars the sharing of Web space between charities and related advocacy groups, what’s to stop the service...

A top Senate aide says the Internal Revenue Service might have grounds to tax board members of private foundations who placed all of their organizations’ assets with Bernard L. Madoff, the investor who allegedly ran a $50-billion pyramid scheme.

Under Section 4944 of federal tax law, foundations and their officers, directors, and trustees can be liable for tax if the organizations make any investments that would financially jeopardize the carrying out of the foundations’ work.

“I’d be curious to know if any of those foundations [that placed all assets with Mr. Madoff] considered the impact of Section 4944 before they made those investments,” said Theresa Pattara, tax counsel to Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee. “It would be fair to ask for board minutes, the thought processes, and the decision making they went through before putting all their money at risk.”

The Madoff...

David Eisner, chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service since 2003, said he plans to step down in mid November. Mr. Eisner, who was appointed to the post by President Bush, told his board and staff members that he plans to leave after the November 4 presidential election.

The corporation is the government agency that operates AmeriCorps, Vista, Senior Corps, and other federal national-service and volunteering programs. In a letter to colleagues, Mr. Eisner said Nicky Goren, his chief of staff, will serve as acting head of the agency until the next president appoints his successor.

Mr. Eisner said in the letter that the agency will celebrate its 15th anniversary in 2009 as the momentum around national service is growing.

He cited recent events, including the pledges by presidential nominees John McCain and Barack Obama to support service and...

Leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives have announced they will adjourn without reconciling a set of tax breaks, including several measures that would affect charitable giving, with a bill passed earlier this month by the Senate.

After several months of difficult negotiations, the Senate early last week passed its version of legislation that would renew a variety of tax breaks, such as allowing older donors to get a tax break when they give charities money from their individual retirement accounts.

Until December 31 of last year, donors age 70 1/2 or older were able to transfer up to $100,000 to charity from their individual retirement accounts each year without paying income taxes on the money. The Senate’s legislation would renew the provision retroactive to January 1, 2008, and extend it to the end of 2009.

Additional provisions in the Senate legislation would renew and...

The Internal Revenue Service has released its list of 314 projects that it plans to complete before the end of June 2009, including 11 items that would directly affect tax-exempt organizations.

Included in the agency’s to-do list for nonprofit groups are finalizing the regulations for the new Form 990, proposed rules and penalties for donor-advised funds, and new disclosure requirements for tax-exempt organizations that participate in tax shelters.

The Internal Revenue Service will offer a Webcast on November 4 to explain important changes in the new Form 990, the income and spending disclosures form required for most tax-exempt organizations.

The presentation includes a panel of tax experts, including IRS officials Ronald J. Schultz, a senior technical advisor at the agency, and Stephen Clarke, a tax-law specialist.

An Internal Revenue Service official announced yesterday that the agency would soon be sending a questionnaire to roughly 400 colleges and universities to collect information on their executive compensation, endowments, and unrelated business income.

The survey had been scheduled as part of the agency’s fiscal year 2008 work plan, and is meant to identify how higher-education institutions are currently reporting financial data and if there are gaps in information that need to be filled in, said Steven J. Pyrek, an IRS spokesman.

The announcement comes less than a week after a spokesman for Sen. Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, told The Chronicle that he would like to see a new Form 990 tax schedule that would be specifically geared to colleges and universities and would require more reporting of colleges’ costs and student populations.

Washington

Sen. Charles E. Grassley Tuesday called on officials at the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Treasury Department to develop an addition to the Form 990 tax return that would be specifically geared to colleges and universities.

The new tax form, which he requested during a Capitol Hill briefing on college costs and endowment spending, would require institutions to report information about their student populations and costs, he said in his remarks.

The current Form 990, which applies to all nonprofit institutions, just received an overhaul that goes into effect for the 2008 tax year.

But Mr. Grassley said colleges should receive an additional schedule of disclosure requirements, which he said would be similar to a form recently devised for nonprofit hospitals.