Nonprofit finance, accounting, and tax news. Other tidbits of interest to the charity community.
If the allowances you provide to your staff aren’t handled correctly, the amount they receive can become taxable income. There are lots of things to say on this issue, but I will mention just a few.
Bryan Baughman has cautions at 2 Tips Related to Employee Allowances, posted at Faith-Based Accounting.
What could go wrong in this picture?
Your church has three portable hard drives that are used to back up the server data. Every day one of your faithful staff dutifully swaps out the portable hard drive and makes a new, complete backup of your server. When a backup is complete, the portable hard drive with the fresh set of backup data is put on the shelf over the server, where it belongs.
What’s the problem?
Various tales of disasters arising from people hitting the ‘reply all’ button were told in an article from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Simultaneously entertaining to see other’s embarrassment and fear-inducing that you could do the same thing. I’d like to give you a link so you can read the full article, but it looks like the WSJ doesn’t like that idea anymore.
Got a great idea from the article you might enjoy:
Move the ‘reply all’ button so you can’t accidentally hit it. Also requires a more intentional effort to choose that option.
Can you see the danger here?
A ministry faithfully backs up their computer data every day. They have two or three sets of media. Perhaps it is a tape that’s swapped every day or several different thumb drives that are alternated. When it’s time to make a new backup, the staff person faithfully grabs a backup media, making sure it is the oldest backup, puts it in the computer and successfully makes another backup. Next day the process is repeated.
What’s wrong?
In his post Who will say go?, Seth Godin describes three different kinds of people:
Here’s a little-spoken truth learned via crowdsourcing:
Most people don’t believe they are capable of initiative.
(duplicate of post from Attestation Update)
Attorney Jay Shepherd gives us 500,000 reasons to worry about retaliation claims.
He explains that when something bad happens to an employee after filing a discrimination claim, it makes it look like the employer retaliated against the employee for filing the claim. Looks like payback. That is a bad thing. Very bad. That is a serious offense in the eyes of the law.
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
Might be worth your time to ask your funders if they really need to see audited financial statements. If the only reason you’re having an audit is to meet the requirements of a few foundations, call them to see if they still need it. Perhaps they would be happy with reviewed financial statements.
While rare, clergy killers are real. It would be wise to know of the concept and have a bit of knowledge on hand in case you should ever encounter one.
Clergy Killers, By G. Lloyd Rediger, ISBN 978-0664257538
From my review at Amazon:
You may wonder why there is a book tackling what seems to be an issue so severe that it must be extremely rare, if it even really exists. The author is addressing the specific situation when a member of the congregation is truly focused on destroying a pastor. Most people have never seen a clergy killer in operation. I have.
Bryan Baughman describes a number of things you as a ministry leader should make clear with all of your staff. In his post, Is Your Church Exposed, he suggests you should:
(duplicate of post from Attestation Update blog )
Looks like FASB is listening very seriously to the comment letters on leases. They seem to be backing off on some of the strongest components of the lease revisions. (see big news in UPDATE below!)
Standard question on just about every audit is whether the organization is breaking any laws or regulations. Most perceptive response I ever received was “none that I know of, and that’s what worries me.”
I have written a series of eight posts on the documentation rules for reviews and comps from SSARS 19 on my other blog, www.attestationupdate.com. Those posts have been combined into a single ‘page’. This means you can read all the posts in chronological order, which also means they are in logical order. Click here for the page.
“Technology is eating jobs”
So says Andy Kessler in his Wall Street Journal article, Is Your Job an Endangered Species?
He says there are two kinds of workers today: