Tax, Legal & Compliance

Concern Worldwide, a humanitarian aid organization based in the U.K., was in scramble mode last week after it mistakenly charged 25,000 monthly donors 100 times their normal giving amounts. The charity didn't provide dollar figures, but some quick math reveals a multimillion-dollar mistake. If each donor pledged $52 a month (the average recurring monthly donation, according to one study) that total would be an astronomical $130 million, with each donor's bank account hit for $5,200...

Healing Arts Initiative, the New York charity at the center of a $750,000 embezzlement controversy, on Friday fired executive director D. Alexandra Dyer and chief financial officer Frank Williams. The board said it fired the pair for withholding “critical financial and other information,” according to The New York Times. But Dyer and Williams say they were forced out for exposing the board's financial negligence...

In a sign of the continuing chaos at the top of the $12 billion Hershey charity, the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General is seeking the resignation of three long-standing board members at the Hershey School for poor children, according to a letter from the office obtained by The Inquirer. The resignations would amount to an…

Hard to see, the Dark Side is—especially when you can’t use your lightsaber to light the way. Newmindspace, a Toronto-based nonprofit, has rebranded its popular charity lightsaber battles as the “Cats in Space Tour” after it received a cease-and-desist letter from Lucasfilm’s lawyers for using trademarked terms, the Toronto Star reported...

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said Thursday he intends to take court action to stop a Utah telemarketing company from using what he called “deceptive, unsavory and aggressive” solicitation tactics to extract charitable contributions that Michigan residents have said they never agreed to make. Schuette said in a statement that he will ask for a…

House Republicans seek to prevent the IRS from collecting information about nonprofits' donors—a call to change the federal requirement for nonprofits to list donors of $5,000 or more on their tax returns...

There’s new trouble for a woman who ran a controversial charity in Raleigh, N.C. The North Carolina Secretary of State’s office is looking at Jennifer Pierce’s participation in an ongoing criminal enterprise that cost two companies nearly $1 million. CBS North Carolina has uncovered a number of court documents that indicate Pierce and an accomplice were using…

A woman filed a discrimination lawsuit against the Getty Foundation alleging she was denied an undergraduate internship with the institution because she is white. In the lawsuit filed Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Samantha Niemann accused Getty of violating her civil rights, racial discrimination and harassment, as well as retaliation. She seeks unspecified compensatory and…

Two brothers await a South Dakota Supreme Court decision tomorrow on whether they can learn what happened to millions of dollars that disappeared from their late father's foundation. Mark and Paul Schwan—sons of Marvin Schwan who founded his namesake frozen-food business that owns brands, like Freschetta and Mrs. Smith's—are trying to figure out where more than $600 million went that the Marvin M. Schwan Charitable Foundation's trustees invested in offshore real estate developments...

Two senators introduced a bill they claim would empower nonprofits by providing more ways to give to charity through tax reforms...