Two great opinion pieces in the Chronicle of Philanthropy that are worth your time, both dealing with the ‘overhead’ issue. At first glance they seem to have opposing views. I think they are both correct with many good points, which illustrates the complexity of the issues.
Leaders of California charity negotiate $3.5M settlement with A.G.
I’m just getting to some news from back in early September. A veterans charity settled a lawsuit from the California Attorney General. The AG asserted excess compensation and diversion of funds to personal use.
My summary is based on these articles:
- Huffington Post – Help Hospitalized Veterans Settles Lawsuit, Execs Agree To Never Lead Another Charity
- CNN – California charity Help Hospitalized Veterans pays $2.5 Million fine
- Lake County News – Attorney General announces new leadership, restitution for Help Hospitalized Veterans charity.
The settlement contains several terms:
Update on church lending and foreclosures
Christianity Today has a brief update on the church lending scene in their article Churches: The New Risky Bet.
The article starts with almost good news of a megachurch in Florida that will meet their requirement of a multimillion balloon payment this year, but only by selling their property to the city and leasing it back for Sunday and Wednesday services.
Did you know encryption software is consider a munition? Be careful of sending computers and programs to the field.
Do you remember ever seeing this comment on a product when you were shopping at Amazon?
Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
Ever wonder the reason for that shipping restriction?
For some products it’s because there is encryption software inside the product with a certain level of complexity.
Why is that a biggie?
Another satire, this time about the lofty heights of the foundation world
Mentioned some satires previously. Here is another. Check out ‘The Gathering’: A Philanthropic Satire, from the Chronicle of Philanthropy reportedly written by someone familiar with the airy world of nonstop high-level meetings at the top of the foundation world.
“Wilson”, the foundation’s CEO, attends non-stop meetings on the conference circuit to talk with the same people he talked to at the last meeting and listen to the same presentations he heard before. As everyone gathers the night before you see: (more…)
Glimpse of what Ulvog CPA website looked like before move to blog
Previously mentioned I’ve moved the website for my CPA practice from GoDaddy using their Website Tonight software to a blog at WordPress. If you don’t like this blog-as-a-web-site idea, I would heartily recommend you check out GoDaddy’s Website Tonight service.
This post will give a picture of what the site was like before the move.
You can see the previous discussion here, with my current website here.
“Once Upon Internal Control” fable now available in multiple formats
I just published my short book, “Once Upon Internal Control” at Smashwords, which means it is now available in several formats:
- Epub – readable on your iPad, Nook, Sony Reader and lots of other e-reading devices
- Kindle
- RTF
You can preview 30% of the book for free.
What’s this book about? (more…)
Football as illustration of differences between audits, reviews, and compilations
Since football season is in full swing, let’s go to the nearest stadium to compare an audit to a review, to a compilation, and to the newest level of service, a preparation report.
Audit
If you were performing an audit, you would be on the field and receive the kickoff at your 20-yard line. A series of passes and runs would slowly move the ball. With effort you would advance to your opponent’s 10-yard line. Good touchdown position.
Advancing the football would be the same as gathering evidence to provide you a reasonable level of assurance so you could issue an audit opinion on the financial statements.
3 satires of development
Consider these jokes that are more than jokes:
Your unneeded radiators can help freezing Norwegians.
Frostbite kills too. Just like poverty.
Check out this spoof of development videos – a fundraiser to send radiators to Norwegians because it is so cold there:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oJLqyuxm96k#t=206]
Compassionate singers and actors in Africa rally to raise funds to help the Norwegians cope with the pressures of living in their environment. Additional comment at end of this post.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oJLqyuxm96k#t=108
Two more spoofs:
A complete failure
More good stuff on overhead ratios and “worst charities” – 10-16-13
I’m adding a new category of good stuff, which will be called “impact” for the time being.
Here are some more articles worth attention but I don’t have enough time to comment in a full post. Here are the headlines, with links and a brief comment below:
- When Good Is Not Good Enough –
- To Get to the Good, You Gotta’ Dance With the Wicked
- Why I Think Nonprofits Should Act More Like Businesses
- Revisiting America’s worst charities and rethinking overhead: Interview with Kendall Taggart
- Investigators say police charity hired felons to raise donations
Impact
Empoprise celebrates 10 year blogiversary
(Cross-post from my other blog, Outrun Change.)
My friend, John Bredehoft, celebrates his tenth blogiversary today at Empoprise-BI. His post highlighting that achievement is Ten-year anniversary of my first blog post.
He writes five blogs each addressing a different topic, one of which I mention here frequently: tymshft
That’s quite an achievement. Congratulations John!
Another example of a website running on a blogging platform
Something missing from the Journal of Accountancy article on GIK
William Barrett points out there was some missing disclosure in the JofA article on GIK in his post Seattle-area charity scores P.R. coup from lack of disclosure.
I discussed the JofA article here.
The missing information is that World Vision is one of the biggest players in the GIK valuation issue getting so much attention today.
The JofA article contains no mention that World Vision has been criticized heavily for their accounting of GIK.
The clock is running on cleaning up GIK
A few thoughts for meetings being held today….
The clock is ticking. Perhaps that’s a good analogy since football season is well underway.
Unlike football, we don’t know how much time is on the clock, but we do know time is running.
The nonprofit community still has time to clean up the GIK valuation issue since the clock hasn’t run out.
What is success? Strategic planning, mission, vision, and outcome measures flow from one question.
Here’s a great question to drive your strategic planning:
What is success?
Follow-up questions could be:
- What does success look like?
- How will we know when we achieved it?
- How can we measure it?
If you can answer that one key question, a host of other questions would be easy to answer.
