They are Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector; Roger Colinvaux, an associate law professor at the Catholic University of America;  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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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 business income—the money they earn for activities not related to their charitable missions—and new rules requiring the IRS to monitor the charity care and community benefits that nonprofit hospitals provide.

The hearing will also examine recent efforts by nonprofits to design good-governance standards, the redesign of the Form 990 tax return that is filed by nonprofits, and the history of recent changes to the tax code that affect nonprofits.

May 15 update: The subcommittee announced that witnesses would include Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector; Roger Colinvaux, an associate law professor at the Catholic University of America;  Joanne M. DeStefano, vice president for finance at Cornell University; Bruce R. Hopkins, a nonprofit lawyer; and Michael Regier, a senior vice president at VHA, a nonprofit-hospital cooperative.

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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 campaign, the couple reported $21.6-million in income in 2010 and gave $3-million to charity. In 2011, they reported $20.9-million in income and made $4-million in charitable gifts.

Both of the men who want to win the 2012 presidential race have given considerably more than the share of income reported by other people at their income level.

Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, in tax documents released today, reported that they had given about 1.5 percent of their income to charity in 2011. The Bidens, who reported income of $379,035, contributed $5,540 to charity in 2011, according to the White House.

“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 charities to press their issues with elected officials on Capitol Hill. ”There’s lots of opportunity to interact with lawmakers and staff,” Mr. Schulz says, adding that politicians use an election year “to step back” and delve into complicated issues such as long-term tax reform.

Mr. Schulz says that he’s stepping up efforts to speak with lawmakers about several tax proposals, such as simplifying an excise tax on private foundations and extending a measure that enabled people to donate their individual retirement accounts to charity tax-free.

Mr. Schulz is also hoping that other charities will join his organization in lobbying against President Obama’s proposal to limit the charitable deduction that the wealthiest taxpayers are allowed to take.

“Foundations and nonprofits need to be more engaged in policy discussions,” Mr. Schulz says.

And the quiet time on Capitol Hill may be just the moment to do that.

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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 value of its noncash donations. Food for the Hungry disputes the IRS’s action.

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 to charity.

Mr. Santorum’s giving is similar to that of Newt Gingrich, his fellow GOP contender, who gave about 3 percent of his earnings to charity, but far less than Mitt Romney, who gave 13.8 percent of his wealth to charity in 2010. President Obama, meanwhile, gave 13.6 percent of his total income to charity.

Mr. Santorum also created Operation Good Neighbor in 2001, a charity to help low-income people in his home state of Pennsylvania.

The charity, which closed in 2007, spent at least 60 percent of its money on fundraising, consulting, administration, and office rent paid to one of Mr. Santorum’s political allies,  The Washington Post recently reported. Of the $2.58-million raised, 39 percent was given to groups working directly with the needy.

Robert Pratter, a former board member of charity, told The Post that the group’s expenses were reasonable for a small nonprofit struggling to raise money on its own.

“We were raising money for these very small mom-and-pop groups. The most effective way to raise money was the way we raised it,” Mr. Pratter told the newspaper.

Dig deeper: Learn about the stands the Republican candidates for the presidential nomination have taken on nonprofit issues.

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 by the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act of 2009, although they never received the budget allocations that the bill envisaged—$50-million for the volunteer fund and $5-million for the “capacity-building” fund. The former got $3.9-million last year and the latter got zero last year and less than than $1-million in 2011.

Mr. Obama said he was forced to make “difficult choices” because of budget constraints.

Mr. Obama’s budget also fails to resuscitate the Learn and Serve program, a community-service program for students that Congress killed in 2011 but that advocates were hoping could return.

President Obama said his budget for AmeriCorps—$470-million, just a sliver less than last year’s— would pay for 82,500 members, about the same as now.

The Serve America Act called for a big expansion of AmeriCorps, to 250,000 by 2017, but concerns over the federal deficit have made that impossible. House Republicans have tried to kill the program completely several times in recent years.

The president’s budget would restore some of the money that Congress cut from the agency’s inspector-general’s office in the 2012 budget.  Lawmakers approved a spending bill late last year that cut that office’s budget from $7.7-million to $4-million, prompting the inspector-general ‘s office to warn it would have to lay off staff and decrease oversight. Mr. Obama proposed increasing the budget to $5.4-million.*

*Editor’s Note: The original version incorrectly said this was $5-million.

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.”

A White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, echoed that Mr. Podesta had requested the move because of the long wait for confirmation, adding, “This is one more example of the unfortunate obstructionism in the Senate.”

Mr. Podesta was an unpopular selection with some Republicans. A group of conservative leaders included him on a list of “controversial” and “egregious” presidential nominees in a letter they sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2010.

The national-service board, which is supposed to have 15 members from both political parties, is now down to just six. President Obama’s nominee to serve as chief executive of the corporation, Wendy Spencer, is also waiting Senate confirmation.

Note: this story originally reported incorrectly that Mr. Podesta had been re-nominated to the national-service board last month.

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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 to get their tax-exempt status reinstated, but even if they regain charity recognition, their names stay on the list of those that have lost their tax exemptions, says Lois G. Lerner, director of the IRS tax-exempt organizations division.

“Organizations are going to stay on the list for now and forever,” Ms. Lerner said during a Webinar conducted by Independent Sector, a coalition of charities and foundations. “The list is the IRS’s historical record, and we will not be taking names off unless we find that they were erroneously put on the list.”

That poses a challenge for anyone wanting to find out if a charity’s tax-exempt status has been lost and then reinstated, which would require searching both databases. But The Chronicle has developed a shortcut: a database, below, that includes only the 3,500 groups that appear on both lists.

So far, about 9,500 of the 400,000 groups that lost their exemptions have applied for reinstatement, Ms. Lerner said.

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 organization’s members today, also say deficit-reduction plans should include both tax increases and spending cuts, the tax code should remain progressive, and changes to entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid  should not increase burdens on those “least able to care for themselves.”

What’s more, it says, “those who can most afford to contribute more should be asked to do so.”

President Obama has proposed numerous times limiting the charitable deduction for people earning at least $200,000 (for couples, $250,000) as way to raise money for federal coffers, a move nonprofit leaders have warned would dampen giving.

Ms. Aviv said her board, which had struggled a long time to fine-tune the new principles, wants the organization to continue speaking out about the charitable-giving incentive since “that’s our bread and butter.”

However, she said, “if we only deal with the charitable deduction and don’t place it against the backdrop of much larger issues that we should focus on as well, we would be remiss in our responsibilities.”

The new principles say that the tax break for charitable donations should be preserved or modified only in ways that strengthen incentives to give and “respect the freedom of individuals to determine the causes and organizations they participate in and support, and treat those choices equitably.”

The statement about freedom is designed to show how the group will respond if policy makers, for example, propose giving a bigger tax break for gifts that help low-income people than for those going to wealthy institutions like universities—an idea that has been floated several times in the past two decades.

Ms. Aviv said Independent Sector would emphasize the issues outlined in the new principles in its dealings with Congress and the White House.

In his most recent comments on the issue, President Obama said in his State of the Union address last month that he wanted wealthy people to pay at least 30 percent of their income in federal taxes but that his plan would not disadvantage big donors.

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