No, you don’t say! This article from the New York Times rounds out my troika of posts this weekend that began with Chicago non-profits getting boatloads of charitable money that go for political organizing, Chris Coen’s charges that although well paid, Chicago charities have a bad record of caring for refugees. And, now a report that says these groups are losing billions to fraud every year.
…. what is getting the attention of nonprofit leaders is the report’s estimate of the overall cost, which the authors put at $40 billion for 2006, or some 13 percent of the roughly $300 billion given to charity that year.
________
“It’s a surprisingly large number,” said Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University who does surveys of public confidence in charities. “We really need to take a good hard look at what’s going on in these organizations.”
_______
The new report is based on data from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, which, the report said, found that “all organizations,” whether government, for-profit or nonprofit, “lose on average 6 percent of their revenue to fraud every year.” Applying that percentage to nonprofits’ total 2006 revenue of $665 billion — donations, government payments and other income — the authors came up with the $40 billion estimate.
Read it all! And, I can’t believe I’m saying this, good for you New York Times!