Tax, Legal & Compliance

How do you turn a charitable donation into a scam? Take the donated item and sell it for a profit, instead of giving it to the needy. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said his office has reached a settlement with a for-profit company accused of doing just that, by way of more than 1,100…

A nonprofit located near Ferguson, Mo., was awarded $1.6 million by the Department of Justice to promote child safety issues, but then neglected a multitude of federal grant laws and regulations. The nonprofit ignored federal stipulations intended to ensure that tax dollars are spent efficiently and ethically, including cost analyses, competitive bids for goods and…

NPQ has written many times about the fact that embezzlement thrives in informal situations, which is a good description of many small nonprofits. But in such organizations, the damage done to internal culture and external reputation may prove hard to heal. Nonprofits that take the issue on with transparency may avoid some of that damage;…

The chairman of a nonprofit mentoring program for at-risk boys, which has had contracts with two area school districts, has been accused of asking a teenage boy to send him an explicit photo. Paul Dean Jamison Jr., who founded Developing Boys To Men (DBTM) in 2009, was arrested Friday morning. Bail was set at $10,000.…

A federal jury in Madison, Wis., awarded The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s intellectual property arm more than $234 million Friday in its patent infringement lawsuit against computer- and gadget-maker Apple. The verdict on the award amount, reached after the jury deliberated for about three hours, was about $165 million less than the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation…

Mark Noltner, who lives in suburban Chicago, heard about McTeacher's Nights when he found a flier in his daughter's backpack last year. "There was a picture of Ronald McDonald [on the flier]," he says, and it was promoting the school fundraiser at a local McDonald's. During McTeacher's Nights, teachers stand behind the counter at McDonald's,…

A North Carolina woman and her mother have been indicted on federal charges that they defrauded more than $574,000 from a program designed to feed low-income children. Cindy Hall and her mother, Stephanie Almond, falsified documents and exaggerated the number of children being fed through their Suffolk nonprofit in order to get more federal funds,…

The “Wheels for Wishes” advertisements seemed clear about who would get the money raised from donated vehicles, stating “Donate Your Car. Benefiting Make-A-Wish Minnesota.’’ But the wishes of kids with cancer weren’t driving the arrangement, says Minnesota’s attorney general. Instead, Make-A-Wish charities in Minnesota and nationally received about 20 percent of the revenue from donated cars,…

A man who promised Virginia Tech a $30 million donation has been sentenced to prison for wire fraud and money laundering. The Washington Post reports that Phillip Barnard was sentenced to five years and three months in prison Tuesday in federal court. Barnard pleaded guilty earlier this year. Prosecutors said Barnard never had any legitimate…

If newspapers are having trouble turning a profit without deep annual cuts, how about becoming a nonprofit? That question’s been asked a lot over the last decade of print decline—even though it glides past the fact that nonprofits need revenue and a business model just as much as for-profits do. The latest possibility to be…