Cheating Charities

All kinds of people get upset when they think somebody is taking advantage of kids or sick people or poor, dumb animals. That’s the image that was recently provided by a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter when she dug deeply into the 990s of a number of charities, only to find that for every dollar they collected, 8 or 9 cents went to the cause and the rest went to fundraising and fat salaries for the executive director. Not that I’m against fat salaries – not at all – but how do these folks sleep at night. In one case, disabled veterans were to benefit from over $2.5 million in donations, but instead saw about $300,000 of it. The truly stupid part of this is that the charities in question have to post their disgusting accounting in public – on the 990s. But this has been going on for as long as I can remember, which means for a long time, and no one has found a good way of dealing with it. The Seattle Post Intelligencer article suggests ways of identifying whether your solicitation is coming from a professional fundraiser, but what does that mean? Professional fundraisers are supposed to be dishonest compared to amateur fundraisers? What I’d like to know is why the IRS doesn’t close these people down. Surely they have some quick way to look at the 990s of all the charities in the country and tease out the ones that spend more than 75% of their income on operations. That would be a clue that something stinks.