Press Releases

Notwithstanding the undoubtedly positive motivations of many of the people in the Independent Sector's nonprofit panel effort, NCRP finds little in the panel's latest report to warrant the more than $3 million that IS has reportedly raised for this entire process.

In the spring of 2004, NCRP issued four pages of recommendations on nonprofit and philanthropic accountability that we still stand by as being stronger, clearer, and more on point than the two volumes of analysis and recommendations issued by IS-and the NCRP policy recommendations on nonprofit accountability would do much more to address the issues behind the highly publicized nonprofit scandals that have been front page fodder for the past 2-3 years. The NCRP principles, entitled "Standards for Foundation and Corporate Grantmaking" (click title for PDF), warrant comparison with the IS report.

Slowly, very slowly, the IS process is micro-inching closer to the recommendations for action that NCRP has long publicized and disseminated-but by micro-inching toward increased nonprofit accountability, I

Despite their protestations of how fast the process is, it seems that IS has taken some pretty clear issues and potentially clear solutions and found a way to "wait out" Congress and undermine the momentum for action that existed as of the Senate Finance Committee's hearings last June and July. Even the purportedly "final" panel report promises yet another report addressing critical issues that have been on the agenda since 2003, including the composition and levels of foundation administrative costs that were addressed in the language of the original Charitable Giving Act of 2003 (H.R.7) until undone by foundation sector lobbyists.

In sports terms, referees would have handed Independent Sector a "delay of game" penalty. IS spokespersons have prided themselves with having forestalled precipitous Congressional legislation, as though the Senate Finance Committee had been prepared to immediately enact the discussion items in the Committee staff's white paper last summer. But IS may well have succeeded in designing a process that waited out the short attention span of most members of Congress and avoided taking any substantive action. The sector could have acted on needed legislation when the iron was hot, but now it's tepid at best.