Pearl River Nonprofit organizations, particularly those that are privileged with a tax-exempt status, accept those benefits with the commitment that they will act in all ways as educational and charitable enterprises benefiting the community and the constituencies that are their mission. This sector is broad and covers small civics, grassroots community organizations, and huge universities, hospitals, and cooperatives. All organizations having this kind of IRS designation are required to file 990s with the government, providing some detail on their expenditures, revenue, and compensation. From this starting place, all of them are relatively easy to investigate, even if not exactly transparent, and able to be held accountable.
This is as it should be, but I say all this with a modicum of discomfort, as I read the major papers in August. What are the odds that on the same day, August 3rd, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal would carry front page exposes on nonprofits. The Journal ripped a new one into a Malawi adoption operation run by an ex-Houston salesman that seemed to be something of a scam and knocking on the door of child trafficking, not to mention paying over $172,000 in personal American Express bills and for a safari. The Times went long on the wild compensation and expenditures of the chief executive of GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a $30 million outfit policing media and advertising for that community. The CEO’s compensation could hit between $700,000 and over $1 million, and her perks and expenses including summers cottages, first class flights, luxury hotels, all of which seemed grossly inappropriate and out of line, regardless of her board’s rationale and feeling blackmailed to keep her with the organization. More recently at the end of August, the Times eviscerated a small anti-police nonprofit run by a Black man from Oklahoma City founded ostensibly to bring accountability after the death of his lover Raheem, who may or may not have been real, and where there was also spending on luxury vacation rentals, car services, and other personal items.
Two things hit me hard.
First, how is it possible that nonprofit executives have learned nothing from the fall of Wayne LaPierre at the National Rifle Association or James O’Keefe at Project Veritas for similar excessive organizational and personal spending. Admittedly, these were both far right, conservatives using their nonprofits as private piggy banks, but still, how could their public humiliation and disgrace not be an object lesson restraining the entire sector?
Secondly, as righteous as these three stories might be in exposing miscreants confusing the mission of their organizations with their personal affairs and finances, I still am a bit uncomfortable with these big papers with their Pulitzer-prize reporters, research, and data teams focusing on relatively small fry when the flaws of huge, billion-dollar nonprofits and their mission drift and abuses dwarf these nonprofits. Admittedly, both the Journal and the Times have reporters that are looking at some of the abuses of nonprofit hospitals when it comes to charity care, but they could use help, and have hardly touched the surface. How about looking harder at the partisan activities of some of these pretend nonprofit trade associations? How about the lack of diversity and democracy in rural electric cooperatives, and some of the questionable expenditures and governance practices in these organizations? How about philanthropy and donor advised funds and their increasingly questionable value as anything other than tax dodges? How about corporate foundations and whether they are anything other than a place to park profits and extend marketing and PR in other ways? These papers have the big guns, so they need to be hunting big game, not squirrels.
Nonprofits need to be accountable, but fair is fair.