Tax, Legal & Compliance

Mature charitable enterprises operating in today’s challenging environment view their compliance obligations through the lens of stewardship. They see risk and opportunity as two sides of the same coin. An organization that effectively manages its compliance risk is almost certainly, by definition, an organization poised to take expedient advantage of available opportunity...

In November 2015, a mysterious donor identifying himself as Juan Diaz Romero, a self-proclaimed Wall Street financier, delivered a $1.5 million check to the High School for Enterprise, Business and Technology in Brooklyn, New York. The school, understandably ecstatic, sent the check to the Department of Education, which gave the go-ahead for the school to start using the funds. But there was one minor issue. The check was fake...

After Jonathan Dunning left as CEO of Central Alabama Comprehensive Health (CACH) in Tuskegee, Ala., in late 2008, he still called the shots at the agency for the poor and homeless for at least two more years, former CACH employees testified Wednesday. "He was the boss," former CACH executive secretary Claudia Johnson testified at Dunning's…

A lawsuit filed in Dallas County Court on Tuesday by a nonprofit corporation against the NFL seeks up to $100,000 in damages. It accused the league of sending it “hush money” and committing fraud after it rescheduled a charity event away from a venue on casino property. According to the lawsuit, which was obtained by…

A Florida trial aimed to determine whether an education advocate was doing his job or extorting a school district official for money. A six-person jury convicted Clarence Shahid Freeman of extortion and unlawful compensation or reward for official behavior last week...

The case of Hulk Hogan suing Gawker Media over a leaked sex tape started out strangely. It got stranger still when it turned out that Peter Thiel—a Silicon Valley billionaire whose politics espouse free speech and who has given money to a journalism organization—funded a suit that could put Gawker out of business. And now…

First, the NFL tried to buy itself a talking point of spin. The cost: $30 million, courtesy of a "no strings attached" donation to the National Institutes of Health, which was conducting a study on the relationship between chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and football. "Hey, look, we care so much we are funding the study."…

Fighting charity fraud could become more difficult under a Republican bill in Congress to prohibit the IRS from collecting the names of top donors to charities and other nonprofit groups, critics warned on Tuesday. Meant to protect the privacy of wealthy individuals who make anonymous, or "dark money," donations to politically active nonprofit groups, the…

When the phone rang in November 2015, Danette Crenshaw of Glencoe, Minn., declined to donate $20 to an organization called the Foundation for American Veterans. So she was confused when she got a call from the same group a few days later, claiming that she had pledged $20 and asking that she immediately pay over…

The Boston Globe's Sacha Pfeiffer, of the paper's Spotlight team, has a fantastic story about foundation trustee Mark J. Avery, who Pfeiffer mentioned in a 2003 report on the pitfalls of inherited trustee positions. In that report, Pfeiffer used Avery as an example, citing the $400,000 annual salary and other benefits he reaped simply for inheriting his late father's trustee seat. Now, Avery is back in the news after a federal court found him guilty on 11 of 17 charges...