CAM, Giving and Financial Integrity

[RZehr]

I hope Group 4 is very small.

[appleman2006]

I hope Group 4 is very small.

Same here. So small that there is no way for me to be part of it.

[Judas Maccabeus]

Any questions asked to the DA wouldn't have them respond that way. It's true that the risk of questioning valuations by a small non-profit is extremely small.

But for tax purposes, the nonprofit would not be valuing gifts. It issues (Or should be issuing) a receipt stating the goods given. Taxpayer is responsible for the valuation for purposes of taxation. Any valuation the charity makes for it’s internal records are a guess at best, and really should not matter to the donor. It would show up on the charity’s accounting as goods in kind received. What would be the point of questioning it on an audit, unless the charity subsequently sold the donation, and than the amount it was sold for would become the value for accounting purposes. My background is physics, so I am not an accountant (Hats off, where are you when we need you?). Am i missing something here?

J.M.

I am not exactly sure how your charitable tax laws are in the US. In Canada what a thing is valued at could make quite a difference to an individual donor. To be honest I am not even sure if an individual can count in kind donations other than food as part of their charitable givings. I never have.

What I do know is that for some reason governments have allowed in kind food donations to be counted as charitable giving. I think it was to encourage farmers and wholesalers to go to the bother of trying to find a home for their excess rather than letting it go to waste. Here in Canada around 30 to 40 percent of your charitable giving can be treated as a direct credit against taxes owed. It is for that reason that the government wants third party verification if a receipt is asked for to verify the actual amount of the produce. But I do not see how CAM would gain in any way other than if it got known that they are willing to artificially raise the value of goods that more people might donate to them. It would have no direct benefit to them but it could to the donor and I can see why donors might put pressure on charitable organisations to inflate values for them. .

Here, in most cases, the valuation is the responsibility of the one taking the deduction. My (unsaved) brother, an MBA no less, would routinely inflate such, in the hope that he would not get caught, or if so, it would be difficult to challenge his valuation. Large in kind donations are likely to attract attention during an audit, so it would be prudent to have some kind of third party appraisal.

In the US, it can be used to reduce your taxable income, you do not get a tax credit.

BTW, I just got out my receipt book, from when I was a missionary. In the instructions it says "Do not give cash receipts for anything except cash or checks." "Do not receive any other contributions, have the individual contact headquarters accounting."

This would have been from the late 1990s.

J.M.

J.M.

J.M.

[knotdust]

Thank you RP.

You put a lot of thought into what you wrote and a clear explanation of how it must work.

I plan to print that off and keep it around for my own edification. Group 2 is where I strive to be.

One of the hardest positions of a treasurer of any charitable organization is to have to say "No I cannot accept that donation with those type of stipulations or restrictions placed upon it" Another one is "No that gift is not tax deductible and I cannot give you a receipt for it."

A good place to start is to delve into the regulations about charitable giving etc relating to any group considered a 501-C3 organization. IRS.gov has much detailed information and more than you will ever want to know.

[steve-in-kville]

As I stated before, just tired of keeping secrets. I have no agenda. Put me in whatever group that is.

Like I said earlier, I understand being tired of keeping secrets. I applaud you. I hope you can move from keeping secrets to not keeping them with integrity. I think I laid out a good case for how doing it without integrity looks like. You do it however you wish. Machs mich nix aus.

Ragpicker... I appreciate your insight on this subject. I will admit that I find myself baffled. We have a thread with well over 100 pages on the sexual abuse in CAM's organization. But when I recount an experience I had with them involving money (cooking the books?), people loose their minds. Its not an accusation. Its something that actually happened. I was there.

[ragpicker]

As I stated before, just tired of keeping secrets. I have no agenda. Put me in whatever group that is.

Like I said earlier, I understand being tired of keeping secrets. I applaud you. I hope you can move from keeping secrets to not keeping them with integrity. I think I laid out a good case for how doing it without integrity looks like. You do it however you wish. Machs mich nix aus.

Ragpicker... I appreciate your insight on this subject. I will admit that I find myself baffled. We have a thread with well over 100 pages on the sexual abuse in CAM's organization. But when I recount an experience I had with them involving money (cooking the books?), people loose their minds. Its not an accusation. Its something that actually happened. I was there.

I can see how that might seem weird to you. I'd like to respond.

1. Do you see the common theme in some of our responses to you? Verify your perception of illegal or unethical activities is corrupt, then report. With a caveat towards verification of your perception, the drumbeat has been to report, report, report.

2. Some of us, OK, I will speak for myself only, I am fed up with innuendo without verification and ACTION. Innuendo such as you put out there, without action, is worse than useless. It makes it extra hard to overcome the resistance from group 3. I'm not accusing you of wrongdoing, I am just pleading with you to follow up what you did with doing the honorable thing.

3. I was as much speaking to the sexual abuse thing as I was to financial, I just finally dumped it on a financial thing, where I am less likely to be irrationally accused of defending wrongdoing because I am asking that it be handled better.

4. I've paid huge prices, prices that nearly destroyed me for reporting sexual abuse, etc. (I thought I was healed, but I just now choked up with tears and my chest heaved over the memory of the deep pain I experienced with one case I helped report, got some more healing that needs to happen, I guess.) I've screwed it up bad in the past. One grievous example was when I caught a friend cheating with another friend, even saying he wanted his wife to die so he could have babies with the girl he was cheating with. I hid it out of fear, then I blew it in how I revealed it. Because of my mistakes, group 3 had their reason to defend the guy and bash me, group 2 wasn't buying what I said, and of course, group 1 was happy to have more stuff to bash the cheater with. Eventually the guy confessed, but a tremendous amount of damage was done in the meantime, completely unnecessary damage. I've also messed up reporting sexual abuse cases, and because of my mistakes, the same dynamics I mentioned above led to the abuser getting off. I've also handled it fairly well in other cases, and it worked much better. So this stuff is deeply personal with me. I'll cut victims of personal violations (a sex abuse victim for example) a ton of slack. Not so for people who claim to be exposing this crap. I try to have grace, but I absolutely do not excuse bad behavior, just as I don't excuse mine. Especially when the put themselves out as authorities on the matter. At that point, I demand professional, careful, accurate work. None of us should accept any less.

5. Your allegations of financial impropriety, if true, are part of a bigger package. I have no desire to protect or destroy CAM. I want everything thoroughly investigated, I want clarity on the wrongdoing, I want transparency, I want consequences for wrongdoing, and I want accountability. Whatever pain that comes out of that, I care about the pain anyone is facing, but on a different level, I don't. The perpetrator's of wrongdoing are responsible for the pain, not me or anyone who is doing the right thing to stop and expose the wrongdoing. What I want out of this case has been directly hindered by carelessness, innuendo, etc. I'm tired of it.

6. Bonus. The idea that CAM should be let off the hook because of all the people they help is 100% bogus. You do not decide whether you do the right thing based on the problems it might cause elsewhere. You do the right thing, and then deal with the consequences. It would be a massive undertaking to transfer CAM's aid to other organizations, but it could be done, if it came to that. I do not know what is going on with CAM. I have no access to credible information. Neither do 99% or more of the people pontificating on it. I blame CAM for a lot of that. Typical for conservative Mennonites, they vastly underestimate the value of a non-weasely public relations effort. Yes, I made a blanket accusation of conservative Mennonites. I'll stand behind it.

I'm being intense. You are not the subject of my intensity, you just created a venue for me to pour it out. I have minimal negative emotions against you, nothing more than a bit of mild exasperation. Nothing that would warrant the energy I have poured into this. The energy I have poured into this is far more about a bigger picture than your specific issue. I'm more using your thing as an example to make points I feel need to be made. I'd love to buy you a cup of coffee and visit. Nothing against you and I hope this paragraph helps you understand that.

[Ken]

What exactly is being alleged here? Obviously the last 6 pages of comments have gotten astray from the subject line. But I can't figure out what, if anything, is being alleged. Perhaps I missed a post somewhere.

I have no direct experience with CAM. But I have been involved in both financial and in-kind donations to public schools which operate under the same rules. I would be shocked if an organization like CAM did not operate scrupulously correctly when it comes to this sort of thing. The rules are not complicated or ambiguous.

Public schools frequently receive in-kind donations. For example, local scientific laboratories and pharmaceutical companies would sometimes donate glassware and other equipment to our chemistry department. Sometimes parents of graduating students would donate band or orchestra instruments to the school if their graduating children were no longer interested in keeping up the violin or trombone or whatever. In all of these cases, the school accounting office simply provides a thank you letter indicating receipt of the items and describing them. Nothing more. No dollar amount indicated. It is up to the donor to place a value on the item if they are claiming a tax deduction and the IRS has detailed rules for doing this. Every school accounting office knows this.

Public schools also frequently receive monetary donations. Most often these are through PTA fundraisers and in those cases the PTA would be providing a receipt to the donor. Many school districts also have an Educational Foundation which is their fundraising arm that solicits personal and corporate donations to the school district. In my experience, these are usually outside the school district's normal budget and usually support grants that teachers apply for for special projects. A science teacher might apply for a grant to buy special equipment for a particular purpose that wouldn't come through the normal departmental budget, for example. Back in Texas I used grant money to pay for special physics equipment that we couldn't otherwise afford. The grant was sponsored by a local car dealership who got a plaque and publicity in the local paper and a receipt for the dollar amount donated.

Public schools also frequently receive restaurant donations. At most public schools around the country it is common for local restaurants to donate breakfasts or lunches to teachers and staff during teacher work days. On teacher work days I often see breakfasts of muffins and coffee provided by the local Starbucks. Or boxed lunches provided by the local sandwich shops. And yes, there is something of a quid-pro-quo to the extent that they generate good will and loyalty from teachers and staff. Restaurants have special IRS rules that allow them to make "enhanced deductions" for these types of contributions https://www.ksmcpa.com/blog/are-you-tak ... -donations which can make the tax value of the donation much higher than the cost value of the food they are donating. But again, they just receive a thank you letter from the school district. It is up to the restaurant and its accountants to put a value on the donation. When all is said and done, the restaurant might well gain more from the tax deduction and promotional value of the donation than it actually costs them in the wholesale value of the meals they are contributing. In other words, they may actually be profiting. But it is entirely legal and happens hundreds of thousands of times across the country every year.

There are a lot of ways that charities like CAM might be involved in shady accounting or fraud. For example, the Trump Foundation recently paid a $2 million fine for financial improprieties https://apnews.com/7b8d0f5ce9cb4cadad948c2c414afd57 But the problem is usually with how the charity handles and spends funds that have already been donated. Not with the tax treatments of the donations themselves.

[steve-in-kville]

What exactly is being alleged here? Obviously the last 6 pages of comments have gotten astray from the subject line. But I can't figure out what, if anything, is being alleged. Perhaps I missed a post somewhere.

I think I started it when I shared an experience I had with CAM's accounting department some years back. Then either I broke the interwebz or some heads exploded (or perhaps both??)

[Josh]

What exactly is being alleged here? Obviously the last 6 pages of comments have gotten astray from the subject line. But I can't figure out what, if anything, is being alleged. Perhaps I missed a post somewhere.

I think I started it when I shared an experience I had with CAM's accounting department some years back. Then either I broke the interwebz or some heads exploded (or perhaps both??)

The response to that sure was interesting.

Particularly when Steve is one of the most level headed people here who avoids making vague accusations, etc

[ragpicker]

Why is the push to escalate this in a responsible manner being mis-charaterized as rebuttal to the charges? That seems a bit weird to me. The only valid reason I can see for this is that the charges as presented, don't necessarily seem like violations. Some of us are saying, get them verified and escalate. Hold CAM responsible. For our effort, we're being mis-characterized as more or less defending CAM, even when our efforts are being clarified as wanting to hold CAM responsible. Seems weird. But I suppose there's reasons why it's important to some people to characterize it that way.