Tax, Legal & Compliance

Severance pay should be considered whenever an employee is laid off, is terminated with or without cause, or resigns from employment. Termination can result from a variety of circumstances, some of which may involve contentious people or situations, and difficult issues. Thus, severance pay may be a good risk-management tool for avoiding potential 
litigation, adverse publicity and other claims against a nonprofit employer...

If you work in nonprofit in the U.S., you have heard that new federal overtime laws/rules are coming. They affect how we categorize the professionals in our sector—“exempt” or “non-exempt”—and how we pay them, whether through set salaries or through hourly wages that include overtime for hours worked over 40. If reading that sentence makes…

A national clearinghouse for missing and exploited children should have gotten a warrant before going through the email attachments of a man suspected of trafficking in child pornography, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled Aug. 5 (United States v. Ackerman, 2016 BL 253852, 10th Cir., No. 14-3265, 8/5/16). Although the National…

The former chief financial officer of an Alabama nonprofit clinic for the poor and homeless has received 17 years in prison for her role in a scheme to defraud the government. In a news release Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance said 50-year-old Terri McGuire Mollica of Birmingham was sentenced to 15 years for an…

The Olympics are a money machine, not just for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which runs the games, but for its corporate sponsors. So it's no surprise that the IOC goes out of its way to protect its trademarks. Rule 40, the IOC regulation governing who gets to use Olympic intellectual property and where, has been in place for awhile. But this year, it's been revised to include far-reaching restrictions on what brands, nonprofits included, can say on social media...

A federal appeals court said the Internal Revenue Service has not proven it has ended discriminatory practices against conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, reinstating a lawsuit against the troubled agency. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit's unanimous order on Friday reversed a 2014 lower district court ruling that previously dismissed…

It's been a rough six months for Wounded Warrior Project, and it's about to get rougher. New Wounded Warrior Project CEO Michael Linnington, who took over for former CEO Steven Nardizzi and former Chief Operating Officer Al Giordano following the charity's massive public controversy, said he expects layoffs as part of the organization's restructuring. And it's possible the charity will see a 50 percent drop in revenue this year...

An executive in a global Christian charity group secretly has been sending tens of millions of dollars—money intended to aid poverty-stricken families in chaotic Gaza—to the Palestinian militant group Hamas, Israeli investigators say. The news came Thursday as authorities indicted Mohammed Halabi on numerous criminal charges for misappropriating the funds. He is director of the Gaza…

If George Washington University were any other employer, it would owe $39 million in property taxes to Washington, D.C., each year. Georgetown University would have to fork over nearly $9 million; American University, $11 million; and Howard University, about $26 million. But as nonprofit organizations, the universities—which control more than $10 billion worth of city…

Since October 2015, at least four major pharmaceutical corporations have received subpoenas from the U.S. Justice Department investigating their relationships with patient-assistance charities. Add one more to the list. A whistleblower lawsuit last week accused Celgene, a biotechnology giant best known for producing the $644-per-pill cancer drug Revlimid, of donating hundreds of millions of dollars to patient-assistance charities as part of a "scheme to gain billions"...