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$3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

charitysense.com

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Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#61

Post by bombcar »

Aurornis wrote: post #17

> Much of it is operational necessity. But from a donor’s perspective, only 8 cents of every dollar shows up as direct aid and grants. The rest is invisible One of my groups of friend groups has a lot of people who work at non-profits that are really dedicated to good causes. They are people who care and wanted to find jobs with purpose. The companies they work for aren’t, as far as I can tell, trying to grift or swi…

There's also the assumption that "direct aid and grants" is somehow good - but that can also be exactly where the fraud is.

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#62

Post by bombcar »

post-it wrote: post #32
efitz wrote: post #4

I believe that many (most?) non-profits are a combination of grift and money laundering. I would love to see requirements that 75%+ of all non-profit revenue has to pass through to the community, that non-profits may not transfer funds to other non-profits, and that directors and officers cannot be compensated and have very modest limits on expenses.

This article is mostly about universities and hospitals. Not really clear how either of those could possibly pass 75% of funding through to the community.

They'd just redefine salaries as "funding through to the community" - which, if we step back, they kind of are.

Find a university located in a small town and work out how much of the town is dependent on the money flowing from the "gown".

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#63

Post by dmix »

cm2012 wrote: post #53
patmorgan23 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malaria nets are band-aids, what really needs to happen is building up institutions and infrastructure that make the nets unnecessary.

Its easier to build institutions without malaria making you sick all the time.

Burkina Faso was one of Bill Gates biggest donation spots and it's had an endless series of unstable leaderships, insurgencies and coups in the last decade. This scares away both foreign investment and foreign aid. Countries like that have made lots of economic progress but seem to be stuck in this endless cycle of instability which is the bigger issue if the solution is to develop proper industry and proper modern housing sealed from insects.

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#64

Post by sinkasapa »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #38
yuliyp wrote: post #28

"only 8 cents of every dollar shows up as direct aid and grants" That's an extremely misleading statement. For instance, a food bank giving away food to a pantry does not count as "direct aid and grants" (at least, if they're defining that as "Grants and other assistance to domestic individuals." from the I-990" ). The salary for the warehouse worker operating the food bank is also not counted in that 92%. Other cher…

I don’t even get the point of this site. They say: > Most of this spending isn’t waste. Hospitals need staff. Universities need facilities. Even small charities need people to run programs. The problem isn’t intent. It’s that the reporting system was designed to satisfy the IRS, not to show donors where their money went. The complaint seems to be that the form filed with the IRS has the information the IRS is interes…

Having a detailed and auditable report of how money is being used is really helpful for creating the understanding you are talking about. That is what accounting is for and why it is so essential to modern life.

The site is obviously just an advertisement for a weird camera surveillance system, but the concern about incomplete accounting is very real. In many places one might want to contribute to non-profit efforts, IRS information isn't even available. In my work in Ecuador, I have seen a lot of fraud, and half-baked charities. Some rich NGOs sometimes walk in on some field trip that donors have paid for, make some statements about all they are going to do and disappear without follow-up. Basically they are just tourists on a free vacation taking publicity photos. There is a specific organization that comes down to build environmentally safe toilets. Not only are these built by young middle class volunteers that know nothing about building anything but their CVs, the communities they are helping don't even need new toilets. The building supplies tend to be repurposed after the volunteers are gone, every single year. I'd like to know if I paid for that. There are seeds of merit in the program, but also unnecessary waste.

Despite negative examples, there are many worthy things that are done, and could be done in the region. Northern money can go very far in the areas I work. It can do a lot to not just improve but transform people's lives. So you suggest that an answer to money misuse is to have personal experience with any organization you donate to. How many people who have the money are going to spend any real time in Amazonian Ecuador? They aren't there now. What is going to change? Since there are few people with money who can be personally involved, does that mean that no effort should be made to better people's lives there? Obviously, that is what accounting is for. I think the article is absolutely right about that. I find their solution to be creepy and invasive. Maybe just having better auditing and reporting standards makes more sense than pointing cameras at hospital patients, but what do I know?

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#65

Post by xphos »

I think charity is good, I donate to charity. At the same time I once watched a podcast that basically said when you donate to charity the mindset and often the outcome of charity is that its money you throwing away and did not invest in making longer term differences. Its an utterly rude statement but I still feel a fundmental tension in that premise that an organization that could seek profit but whose fiduciary responsiblity was to the community it was serving rather some stock owner would have incentives to establish better long term charity. That well example is supportitive of that thought.

But I think the the argument is certainly not good at other times because not everyone has the ability to invest and make a difference donations lower the requirements and the barriers to both. Also whose to say even a throw away Well doesn't make the world of difference to people who really needed even if it was temporary. I just a struggling thought I have sometimes...

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#66

Post by bilbo0s »

Retric wrote: post #46
bilbo0s wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the material point of HN User Yuliyp's comment is that the organization claiming to be providing us with "Charity Sense", for some reason is not providing us all of the data we need to make sense of charities. Even worse, it seems to be deliberately disingenuous in presenting the data it does give us. At least provide explanations of why certain things are included or excluded from the numbers they're present…

> Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance? Ask the IRS / congress, this isn’t some arbitrary grouping it’s what charity means in the US. I do think it’s worth asking that question, but ask it of the people who can do something about it.

The people claiming to be making sense of charities are the people who are supposed to be teasing that data out.

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#67

Post by bilbo0s »

bombcar wrote: post #59
bilbo0s wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the material point of HN User Yuliyp's comment is that the organization claiming to be providing us with "Charity Sense", for some reason is not providing us all of the data we need to make sense of charities. Even worse, it seems to be deliberately disingenuous in presenting the data it does give us. At least provide explanations of why certain things are included or excluded from the numbers they're present…

> Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance? Because if you don't have shareholders and like to raise money that's not from VCs, it is convenient to have the donors get a tax deduction. Otherwise you can run a business with little to no tax without being a non-profit.

The question was not why did the IRS amalgamate those organizations.

The question was why did Charity Sense amalgamate those organizations.

What value is it adding if it does nothing other than report data we could get from the IRS in any case? Saying, "Hey man, we just re-post the data we get from the IRS." Is the same thing as saying, "We didn't really do any analysis."

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#68

Post by jongjong »

Wow. This is a massive figure.

The US GDP is $30 trillion but most of that is spoken for; it's wages, costs, reinvestment — money that's already doing a defined job. But this $3 trillion is different; it's flowing through entities that are completely exempt from normal market pressures and competition.

What's insane to think about is the composition of it; this isn't charity money, it's Medicare reimbursements, government contracts, university tuition, hospital fees. Which means the most important sectors of the economy — healthcare, education, research — are basically being run by nonprofits. Enormous institutional players with massive lobbying power, operating in markets with no real competition.

It's less that profits are being funneled into nonprofits and more that entire industries have reorganized themselves around the nonprofit structure to avoid the accountability that competition normally creates. Which explains a lot about why the economy feels so captured and doesn't make sense anymore.

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#69

Post by relaxing »

bilbo0s wrote: post #67
bombcar wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance? Because if you don't have shareholders and like to raise money that's not from VCs, it is convenient to have the donors get a tax deduction. Otherwise you can run a business with little to no tax without being a non-profit.

The question was not why did the IRS amalgamate those organizations. The question was why did Charity Sense amalgamate those organizations. What value is it adding if it does nothing other than report data we could get from the IRS in any case? Saying, "Hey man, we just re-post the data we get from the IRS." Is the same thing as saying, "We didn't really do any analysis."

Because they’re pushing an agenda that they mean to profit from.

Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

#70

Post by cm2012 »

dmix wrote: post #63
cm2012 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its easier to build institutions without malaria making you sick all the time.

Burkina Faso was one of Bill Gates biggest donation spots and it's had an endless series of unstable leaderships, insurgencies and coups in the last decade. This scares away both foreign investment and foreign aid. Countries like that have made lots of economic progress but seem to be stuck in this endless cycle of instability which is the bigger issue if the solution is to develop proper industry and proper modern h…

Just because Bill Gates didn't solve all issues in Burkina Faso doesn't mean the donations were meaningless. Burkina Faso's GDP per capita has quadrupled since Bill Gates started donating, in addition to a lot of lifestyle indicators like child health and child mortality and so on. You certainly can't say his intervention made things worse.
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