“Gifts-in-kind: What are they worth? How to avoid pitfalls of GIK valuation” discusses the difficulties in valuing GIKs. The article is available online from the Journal of Accountancy.
The author is Jennifer Brenner, CPA, who is the associate director for financial accounting and operations for World Vision.
I heartily recommend the article to you.
I’ll wait a few days before posting my comments.
Mr. Jeff Beaumont is a CPA working for a firm that focuses on serving the nonprofit community. His opinions are his own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of his firm in any way. Because he speaks for himself, I won’t identify him or his firm in any more detail. He doesn’t speak for me either.
He has about seven years experience as an auditor working on the issues discussed on this blog. Here is Jeff’s second guest post:
By Jeff Beaumont, CPA
Valuing gifts-in-kind is not an easy task. Nor is it quick.
There are not-for-profit organizations that appear to be aggressive with GIKs valuations – a quick internet search will reveal that truth. Not convinced? Ask the IRS for their opinion. Then there are others that take whatever value they can find because they lack the capability – they don’t have the know-how.
This post was written with smaller organizations in mind as they usually do not have the expertise, capacity, and staffing to the extent of their larger brethren.
To record GIKs, it seems there are three choices for management (and, by extension, the auditors) on reporting values: (more…)
Recent news reports indicate federal intelligence agencies are gathering up a lot more information than we knew. That data is available to undisclosed lists of unknown people and will be retained for a very long time.
So what?
Here’s just a few circumstances in which you might not want access to your data by a long list of unidentified persons from various federal, state, or local agencies who were granted access to various unidentified parts of the various databases: (more…)
Update: The Old Reader back up at end of work day Thursday – that makes 1 1/2 days of the weekend and 4 workdays it was down.
Your tech provider may go off-line for an indefinite time. Another reason not to let your technology hold you captive.
The Old Reader went down around lunchtime on Saturday, 7-20, and isn’t back up just before lunch on Wednesday, 7-24. That’s four days – most of the weekend and one-half of a work-week. No public estimate when it will return.
Don’t be held captive by your technology.
In previous post, I said we need more examples to illustrate that charities can accelerate their revenue through a major, sustained telemarketing campaign beyond what they would have done otherwise.
I mentioned one anonymous illustration supporting the idea and three weak counter illustrations.
Three more counter-examples
I’ve looked at the American’s Worst Charities data quite a few times. Each time I get the impression that these long-running telemarketing campaigns are not doing what such efforts are supposed to be doing, specifically, generating a lot of new money over a long-term horizon.
After thinking about the previous two articles together, I decided to do a little analysis.
My small sample confirmed my previous observation – the campaigns are generating small amounts of new funds.
I picked a haphazard starting point, #10 on the list, and pulled data for the next three charities.
Here’s what I see.
One of the reasons cited for charities to make heavy use of telemarketing in spite of the high cost is that with a sustained campaign a charity will grow substantially more than it would otherwise. By incurring heavy costs up front, the charity will have far more money for mission in a few years.
As a concept, I agree.
However, it is time for more than one or five anecdotes.
One anonymous example supporting the concept
Several readers of this blog have asked questions about taking deductions for travel while helping a charity. Volunteers at your NPO are probably asking the same questions. Some tips from IRS Summertime Tax Tip 2013-05 might help.
You might want to make this available to volunteers of your organization. The quoted text is from the IRS, so it is in the public domain: (more…)
What’s the buzz about your charity and your programs?
Today it’s easy to keep your ear to the ground. Here are three new ideas plus an oldie:
Some more articles that are worth attention. I don’t have time to discuss them in a full post.
“Overhead ratio”
StatesmanJournal – Oregon charity law is a first – (more…)
Thanks to all who fight for and defend our freedom. My time on active duty didn’t involve any of the things on this list. No one ever shot at me. My duty was so easy compared to this.
My gratitude goes to those who have returned and those still in the field. A big thanks to the 50 million who have served over the last 237 years.
WHEN A SOLDIER COMES HOME
When a soldier comes home, he finds it hard….
..to listen to his son whine about being bored.
I have a post at my other blog, Attestation Update, describing a speech by the former CFO of Enron that says all of the bad transactions that sent him to jail were approved by the attorneys, approved by the auditors, and approved by the board.
Yet Enron is the poster child for corporate fraud. A bunch of people went to jail for transactions that were fully reviewed and approved.
Here is the question that should unsettle all of us: