Jim Ulvog

College admissions scandal update and freshly reported financial-aid scheme remind me of a verse from Jeremiah about the deceitfulness of the human heart.

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

At a status conference update for the college admissions scandal, the prosecutors said they have turned over about 3 million pages of documents to the attorneys for the 19 defendants still fighting the charges. This includes around a million pages of emails and 4,500 phone conversations which were wiretapped.

Several attorneys claim they want to see all the FBI interview forms (those infamous 302s, which are subsequently prepared notes of interviews documented at some various time after the interview) for all of the people *not* charged in the investigation. The claim is there is exculpatory evidence somewhere in the 302s. The judge denied that request for the moment.

For more info, check out USA Today on 6/3/19: College admissions scandal:  Parents say payments to ringleader weren’t bribes. Next status conference is on October 1.

Another scheme

Financial aid calculations are based on family income and assets.  If a student is assessed as ‘independent’ only the student’s income and assets enter the calculation.

So, how do you get mom’s and dad’s high income and very expensive house removed from the calculation so the student gets a bunch more assistance?

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Jim Ulvog

Sad as it is to read about, leaders in the Christian community need to be aware of what happened at Willow Creek Community Church.

What can we learn from this mess? Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Anyone who has been an adult a few years or has read news for more than , oh a few weeks, knows there is massive ugliness in the world.

Anyone who has been in leadership of a church or ministry for more than a few months knows the ugliness we see in the world is also present in the community of believers.

Why read about and then study messiness?

There are several disasters in the Christian community at the moment which leaders should pay attention to.

Why?

So we can learn. By observing we can be better prepared for dealing with horrible things if (or rather when) they appear in our area of responsibility.

In my professional role as auditor over the last few decades I have observed moral failure of leaders, embezzlement, fraudulent financial misstatements, tax fraud, and sundry other unpleasantness. (Okay, okay, sin is the correct description of those things.)

Because of confidentiality requirements, I cannot discuss anything about any of those issues.

Current, public issues are a different story. Having no connection to those incidents frees me to discuss them.

Willow Creek Community Church

A major scandal has been in the news at Willow Creek for over a year. Here is a tour of some articles which can fill you in.

What can you learn as a leader from this fiasco?

3/22/18 – Christianity Today – Bill Hybels Accused of Sexual Misconduct by Former Willow Creek Leaders. Article summarizes a range of allegations that had surfaced over the previous five years, including stories of decades old misbehaviors.

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Jim Ulvog

FASB plans to postpone changes in lease and credit loss standards for non-public companies.

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

FASB decided on 7/17/19 to postpone four major accounting rule changes for non-public companies. Journal of Accountancy reported the news on 7/17/19:  FASB to propose delaying effective dates for 4 major standards.

Two of the rules are particularly significant to the non-profit community while two will affect few charities.

The article uses a new method of identifying effective dates. It mentions January 1 of the year the standard will first be effective instead of the ol’ “fiscal years beginning after December 15” phrasing usually used..

Changes include:

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Jim Ulvog

Additional public comments on AB 1181

Capitol Building in Sacramento. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

There has been relatively little public discussion of California AB 1181. Here are a few articles I’ve been able to find. Previous public comments discussed here.

CharityWatch

CharityWatch publicly supported AB 1181 on 7/12/19:  CharityWatch Supports California’s Bill to Discourage Charities from Exaggerating Non-Cash Contributions. Comments in the article provide background on the issue.  CharityWatch has long opposed the valuation methodology in place for the sector, mentioning there is an overvaluation issue.

CharityWatch perceives the application of current accounting rules creates enough variability and inconsistency in reporting that they remove all GIK from their ratings calculations.

Here is a one sentence summary of the underlying issue from the article:

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Jim Ulvog

Proposed GIK legislation in California passes Senate Judiciary Committee

Capitol Building in Sacramento. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

AB 1181, which will require specific accounting treatment for GIKs when donors require the donation be used overseas, was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on a 7 to 1 vote, with 1 committee member not voting.

The bill was referred to the Senate Appropriations Committee. Mark Hrywna (@mhrywna) reports the committee will hold  hearings on August 12. The last day to approve bills is September 13, when the legislature adjourns for this session.

FAF and FASB input

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Jim Ulvog

First sentencing in college admissions scandal

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A sentence has been handed down in the first of the college admission scandal cases to reach a judge. The former sailing coach at Stanford received:

  • $10,000 fine
  • 1 day in jail, already served
  • 6 months house detention
  • 2 years supervised release, i.e. probation

Prosecutors recommended 13 months in prison.

Several articles pointed out this person is the lease culpable of those lined up for sentencing. He did not receive any money directly.

If I read the articles correctly, the only student admitted as part of this scheme was not actually an athlete and has since been expelled.  No other students were admitted.

One key point of detention is an assessment of what type of crime is present.

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Jim Ulvog

Comments from recent continuing education classes worth repeating: not-for-profit entities.

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(Following discussion of nonprofit accounting issues was posted at my other blog, Attestation Update, since the string of posts are more focused on the audit community. These comments may be helpful for the nonprofit community so the discussion is cross-posted here.)

 

Here are some fun or interesting or useful tidbits from the October 2018 A&A and the June 2019 Not-for-profit conferences presented by California Society of CPAs that apply to not-for-profit organizations.

Previous posts had comments on

Non-attest services and Yellow Book independence. Everyone probably knows that charities with more than $2 million of revenue who are registered with the California Attorney General must have an audit. Excluded from the requirement would be religious organizations, who are exempt from registering with the AG.

That requirement was created by the Nonprofit Integrity Act of 2004, so it’s old news.

The best payoff from attending CPE conferences is to compare every piece of information you hear to what you think you know. So, here is one of the big rewards for me attending this class…

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Jim Ulvog

Minor revisions to California AB 1181, with bill re-referred to Senate Judiciary Committee.

Image of editing courtesy of Adobe Stock.

On June 28, 2019, the Senate Judiciary Committee made some minor changes to AB 1181. In one sentence, the bill under consideration would require charities to recognize gifts in kind at the fair value in the location where the items will likely be distributed if the items have a geographic restriction.

Comment at the legislature’s website says:

From committee chair, with author’s amendments: Amend, and re-refer to committee. Read second time, amended, and re-referred to Com. on JUD.

I am not quite sure how to read that, but think it means the author made some changes, probably at the suggestion of the committee chair, the bill was technically put back to the committee after that change, the committee made additional changes and the bill was technically put back to the committee again.

All that to say there were minor changes to the proposed bill.

Based on the “compare versions” tab at the website, changes made at this point include:

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Jim Ulvog

Intro and update to college admissions scandal

Lots of things going on behind closed doors that have drawn the focused attention of the U.S. Attorney in Boston. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The pretend-to-be-an-athlete-in-a-sport-you-have-never-even-played scandal in higher education is one of many issues I have not focused on over the last year or more.

Family issues have pulled me away from blogging. Hope to start getting caught up on the massive changes taking place around us. I’ll begin with the college admissions disaster.

Brief background:

A large number of parents were paying Mr. William “Rick” Singer to help their children get into colleges where their kids wouldn’t otherwise gain admission.

More background:

The schemes, according to a long string of articles covered in most newspapers which I won’t link, included techniques such as:

  • Creating fake profile of the student being a competitive athlete when the student had not even played the sport.
  • Paying to have another person take your SAT or ACT tests.
  • Hiring a proctor to oversee extra-testing time and then correcting answers.

Flow of cash was complicated, as expected. Most of the dollars went to a non-profit foundation set up by Mr. Singer. He then distributed portions of the money to college sports coaches, proctors, and other participants. Some of the payments went directly from the parents to the colleges.

Oh, by making those payments to a charity, the payments became tax deductible. So there is also a tax fraud angle for all the involved parents to ponder. You can easily guess someone from IRS Criminal Investigations is involved in each of the cases.

Current status:

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Jim Ulvog

FASB working group looking at GIK valuation issue

Committee meeting. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Yesterday I watched a webcast from FASB providing an update on Private Company Council and Not-for-Profit organization accounting issues  By the way, there are a couple of nice accounting options in the PCC world that have been extended to the NFP world. (Yeah, yeah, pray for me since I sort of enjoy those kinds of discussions.)

One of the speakers mentioned FASB has formed a working group to look at the issue of valuation of GIK, especially donated pharmaceuticals.

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Jim Ulvog

What is the specific, focused target of California AB 1181?

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Update – Mark Hrywna (@mhrywna) tweeted on 6/17/19 the Senate Judiciary committee has scheduled a hearing on AB 1181 on 7/9/19.

After attending CalCPA’s Not-for-Profit Organization conference last week and talking to a small group of my CPA colleagues, I have two thoughts on regulatory attention currently focused on the valuation of donated medicine.  Let me provided two questions which will focus my comments:

  • What is the primary concern of the regulators?
  • What is the specific, focused target of California AB 1181?

Previous post discussed the first question.

As I mentioned in that post, I have long wanted to develop an extensive discussion on the main accounting issues found in the California AG’s three cease and desist orders along with several accounting issues raised in their January 2019 settlement and May 2019 litigation.

That full discussion would have ended up somewhere around 3 or 5 times longer than these two posts. I won’t have time in the foreseeable future to write such an extended discussion. This pair of posts, at over 2,600 words, will have to do.

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Jim Ulvog

What is the primary, core concern of the AG community over charity financial statements?

What, oh what could be the core issue for charity regulators in their recent enforcement efforts? Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

After attending CalCPA’s Not-for-Profit Organization conference last week and talking to a number of my CPA colleagues, I have two thoughts. (Yeah, yeah, I obviously don’t think much if I only have two thoughts after a full day of great presentations.)

Let me offer two questions which provide a way to focus my thoughts:

  • What is the primary concern of the regulators?
  • What is the specific, focused target of California AB 1181?

I have long wanted to develop an extensive discussion on multiple accounting issues found in the California AG’s three cease and desist orders. I would also like to discuss the host of accounting and auditing issues that are explicit or implied in the January 2019 settlement and the May 2019 litigation. It would be fun for me and informative for readers of this blog to dive deep into the wide range of issues raised by the AG.

That discussion would have probably run something in the range of 6,000 or 10,000 words, or perhaps longer.

I have not had the time to go into that extensive detail and don’t anticipate having that much spare time in the near future.

Instead, I will describe in the next post what I perceive is the very precise, very specific target of AB 1181 from the California Assembly and in this post will describe my perception of the key concern for the regulators.

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Jim Ulvog

Update on the charity that settled in January 2019 with the California Attorney General

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Went browsing around the web last night and found the settlement agreement for the AG’s case against the Giving Children Hope charity. Yesterday’s post discussed that case at length.

The National Association of State Charity Officials has a reprint of the California AG’s press release.

Included in the article is a link to the signed Assurance of Voluntary Compliance., which was approved by a judge on January 22, 2019.

Following are a few of the highlights from the signed agreement. In particular, the agreement fills in some of the details I was wondering about.

Remember my previous comment that I could see no reason one particular board member was included in the case?  He was chair of the board from 2014 through 2016, according to paragraph 2. On the settlement agreement, he signed as chairman on behalf of the charity which agreed to dissolve itself.

The CPA cited in the case provided accounting services to GCH from January 2014 through June 2017 (para 2).

In paragraph 10a the AG asserts GCH had at least 25 transactions in which it had one of two controlled subsidiaries purchase medicine from a named wholesaler in the Netherlands for a “very minimal price” and then had the controlled charities donate the meds back to GCH.

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Jim Ulvog

California AG settlement with charity for valuation of GIK

What is the proper valuation of a pallet of medicine purchased on the international market? Image of pharmaceutical warehouse courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Back on January 29, 2019, the California Attorney General announced a settlement with a charity for financial reporting which was misleading because of the valuation of donated pharmaceuticals.

Although the settlement is four months old and thus counts as ‘old news’, it is worth discussing as an indication of the level of concern the AG has for valuing GIK.

The AG’s press release: Attorney General Becerra Announces $410,000 Settlement with Giving Children Hope, After the Charity Engaged in a Misleading Reporting Scheme.

The settlement consists of $400,000 from the charity and $10,000 from four named individuals.

A page on the charity’s website comments on the settlement: Giving Children Hope’s Settlement Resolution.

The charity says its insurance company agreed to pay the $400,000. The charity asserts the penalty was “not paid from donated dollars of program funds.” That would be a technically true statement because the insurance company would have cut the check and not the charity.

The charity also said there were “no fines or penalties levied against” the charity. On one hand I suppose that is correct because an agreement to pay four hundred thousand dollars is not the same as a fine or penalty. I don’t think that’s quite correct for two reasons. First, the AG doesn’t collect voluntary contributions; the payment was made as settlement of civil charges. Second, insurance companies don’t write checks out of the generosity of their heart; they settle the liability of their insureds.

I think most people looking at the situation would agree the charity was hit with a $400,000 penalty.

Individual penalties

The press release says four individuals will also pay $10,000 in total. It is not clear from the press release whether this is a joint and several liability or each person will be billed individually for $2,500.

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Jim Ulvog