May 15, 2012, 2:02 pm
By Suzanne Perry
A House subcommittee has announced that five nonprofit experts will testify at a hearing it has scheduled for Wednesday to examine several issues related to the Internal Revenue Service’s oversight of tax-exempt organizations.
They are Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector; Roger Colinvaux, an associate law professor at the Catholic University of America;Â Joanne DeStefano, vice president for finance at Cornell University, who will be testifying on behalf of the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO); Bruce Hopkins, a nonprofit lawyer; and Michael Regier, a senior vice president at VHA, a nonprofit hospital cooperative.
Rep. Charles Boustany called the hearing. The Louisiana Republican heads the oversight subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee.
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May 9, 2012, 9:55 pm
By Suzanne Perry
A Congressional hearing has been scheduled next week to examine various tax issues affecting nonprofits, including Internal Revenue Service oversight of universities and nonprofit hospitals.
Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., a Louisiana Republican, called the hearing. He told The Chronicle this winter he was concerned the tax agency had not been aggressive enough in monitoring charity abuses.
The event, which will take place May 16 at 10 a.m., will be the first in a series of hearings on tax-exempt organizations planned by the oversight subcommittee of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.
Mr. Boustany, the subcommittee chairman, said in a statement that the hearing would allow nonprofits to weigh in on certain questions he had raised in a letter he sent to the IRS last October.
They include IRS audits of universities in areas including excessive compensation and unrelated …
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April 13, 2012, 1:26 pm
By Peter Panepento
President Obama and his wife, Michelle, gave nearly 22 percent of their income to charity in 2011, according to tax returns made public today.
The couple reported $789,674 in income and gave $172,130 to charity.
The largest gift was a $117,130 contribution to the Fisher House Foundation, a group that provides free or low-cost housing to military personnel and their families while they are receiving treatment at military medical centers. Mr. Obama has been giving the charity the after-tax proceeds of the sale of a children’s book he wrote.
The Obamas’ giving represents a bigger share of their income than that of the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Mitt Romney, and his wife, Ann, according to an estimate of their 2011 taxes, released in January. They reported they had given more than 16 percent of their income to charity in 2010 and 2011.
According to the Romney …
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March 27, 2012, 5:08 pm
By Holly Hall
Legislative decisions often get delayed in a presidential-election year, but that makes 2012 a good time to contact members of Congress and their aides, says Jerry McCoy, a Washington lawyer who advises charities.
“This is a quiet time, and members are less distracted,” says Mr. McCoy. He says that point was brought home to him by two Congressional staff members who last week held an informal, off-the-record gathering with Mr. McCoy and members of the Association of Small Foundations.
One piece of legislation they discussed was a measure to expand the deduction that partnerships and other privately held businesses can get for contributing supplies such as blankets or emergency-relief products. (For more details, see a background report he wrote.)
Andrew Schulz, vice president for government relations at the Council on Foundations, agrees that this year is an opportune time for …
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February 16, 2012, 4:34 pm
By Caroline Preston
The Internal Revenue Service’s annual “dirty dozen” list of the top 12 tax scams in the United States includes schemes that involve charities—in particular, the misuse of noncash donations.
The IRS says that it’s investigating cases in which donors try to maintain control over donations or income from contributions of assets.
The tax agency says it has seen cases in which several charities claim the value of the same donated products.
“Often these donations are highly overvalued or the organization receiving the donation promises that the donor can repurchase the items later at a price set by the donor,” the IRS says.
The Pension Protection Act of 2006 imposed higher penalties for inaccurate appraisals of noncash gifts, says the tax agency.
Last month, the IRS imposed a fine on Food for the Hungry, an international charity, for allegedly misleading the public about the…
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February 16, 2012, 11:37 am
By Lisa Chiu
Rick Santorum and his wife, Karen, gave 2.2 percent of their income to charity from 2007 to 2010, according to tax returns the candidate for the Republican presidential nomination released last night to Politico, a newspaper that covers politics.
The Santorums gave 1.8 percent of their $930,227 in total income to charity in 2010. In 2009, they donated 2.7 percent of their $1,127,266 total income.
The tax returns do not disclose the names of the organizations they supported.
The four years of returns show that the Santorums’ giving is about average for people in their income range who itemize their taxes.
Americans who make $500,000 to $1-million gave on average 2.6 percent of their total income to charity in 2009, the latest year for which the Internal Revenue Service has provided data. People who earn $1-million to $1.5-million gave on average 2.9 percent of their income…
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February 13, 2012, 1:50 pm
By Suzanne Perry
President Obama today proposed increasing the budget for the Corporation for National and Community Service by 1.3 percent next year, to almost $1.1-billion—providing enough money to keep the number of AmeriCorps members at current levels.
In his budget for the 2013 fiscal year, the president said he would also increase spending on the Social Innovation Fund, a grants program to expand effective nonprofit social projects, to $50-million, up from just under $45-million in 2012.
However, the president wants to eliminate two “lower priority” programs that the agency operates—the Volunteer Generation Fund, which provides money for projects to help charities recruit and manage volunteers, and the Nonprofit Capacity Building Fund, which provides grants to organizations to provide training and management help to small and medium-sized charities.
Both of those programs were created …
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February 9, 2012, 8:48 am
By Suzanne Perry
President Obama has withdrawn the nomination of a high-profile pick for a seat on the Corporation for National and Community Service board—John Podesta, a prominent Democrat who was President Clinton’s chief of staff and co-chair of Mr. Obama’s transition team.
Mr. Podesta, founder of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with close ties to the White House, was among seven people that the president nominated in June 2010 to fill vacancies on the national-service board. The nominations were approved by a Senate committee in July but have still not been confirmed by the full Senate.
Andrea Purse, vice president for communications at the Center for American Progress, said in a statement: “Like many of Mr. Obama’s other nominees, Mr. Podesta got tired of waiting for the Senate to act and got busy with other projects and asked for his nomination to be withdrawn. 
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February 7, 2012, 6:36 pm
By Lisa Chiu
The Internal Revenue Service has developed an online database of 400,000 nonprofits that have lost their tax-exempt status for failing to file tax returns.
Previously, the IRS released information about groups that had lost their tax-exempt status only by state, which made it difficult to find groups by other criteria. The new Exempt Organizations Select Check is updated monthly and is on the same Web page as the agency’s main database of all nonprofits that can accept tax-deductible donations.
The tax agency in June unveiled a list of 275,000 organizations that had lost their tax-exempt status for failing to file tax returns for three consecutive years. Since then, about 125,000 more have been added to the list.
Most of the groups—63 percent—were charities. Eleven percent were nonprofit advocacy groups, and 7 percent were social and recreational clubs.
Groups can apply…
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February 7, 2012, 5:48 pm
By Suzanne Perry
Independent Sector, a coalition of nonprofits and foundations that has waged a vigorous campaign against proposals to limit the charitable deduction for wealthy people, has now decided to devote more attention to other aspects of budget and tax policy that could harm poor people.
Critics have accused Independent Sector and other nonprofit advocates of spending a disproportionate amount of energy protecting the charitable tax break, given other critical issues facing the nation, especially those affecting vulnerable people.
Diana Aviv, the group’s chief executive, said Independent Sector’s board “sympathized with that point of view.” It adopted a series of “guiding principles” last week, saying it plans to promote policies to cut the nation’s deficit and overhaul the tax code that do not “exacerbate income inequality or increase poverty.”
The principles, which were sent to the or…
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