Someone forwarded me Autism Speaks’s 990 form from 2008. For those of you who don’t know much about U.S. tax law for nonprofits and various reporting requirements (which I don’t really either), nonprofits must file a 990 every year to show things like contribution revenue, program and administrative expenses, etc. It’s quite a bit like corporate tax forms but with data that applies only to nonprofits (e.g., donations). It is a requirement that their 990 be made publicly available by the nonprofit, and most larger ones publish it on their website, though not necessarily prominently.
These things are generally boring as dirt to read. If you know what you’re looking at, it is, however, a good way to see whether a nonprofit is spending their donations wisely and effectively. This can help you decide where to get the biggest bang for your donation buck, especially if you’re deciding between multiple charities.
Usually the juiciest info to read is executive compensation. Nonprofits must list the compensation given to all their officers and ‘key employees’ (basically, the people who make the most money), board members, trustees, etc. You can get a sense of the mindset of a charity based on whether their compensation packages seem reasonable or not. Some border on the profane.
All that brings us to Autism Speaks’s 2008 990 form. My dislike for Autism Speaks is not exactly a state secret. And I don’t feel like diving into that editorial today. I primarily want to draw your attention to some actual data, and you can make your own conclusions.
[Lots of math and disbelief below the fold.]
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On page 1, notice lines 12 and 15. According to this, Autism Speaks brought in a little over $66 million last year in contributions and grants and other revenue. This was about $22 million more than last year. Now notice line 15. Their total compensation paid out went from $7.6 million last year to $17.8 million this year. In and of themselves, these raw data might not mean much. Raising more money means your organization likely grew and you’d need to pay out more salaries.
I worked for a major nonprofit who shall remain nameless many years ago. On 990s, the ‘this vs. that’ ratios are key to everything. (e.g., how many cents did you spend to raise each dollar of donations; how much money did you spend on programs for the people you serve vs. administrative expenses) These ratios show how one piece of data has increased or decreased relative to another. This is where charity watchdog groups can kill you. They have percentages they expect and deem good or bad and rate you accordingly.
(Note – the math on this next part isn’t perfectly precise because it’s a little more complex than just dividing two numbers, but this would still be very close to reality.)
Unless I’ve forgotten how to divide, this means that Autism Speaks spent approximately 17% of their revenue last year on compensation. Not great, but not that bad in the broader nonprofit world. This year?
27%
To give you some context about averages in the overall nonprofit sector, this is pretty bad.
Now scroll down to pages 8 and 9. This is where they show the compensation for individual people. There are lots of $100,000+ people on the payroll. Their president made $366,000. I’ve seen worse, though usually for nonprofits bigger than them, but they need to keep in mind that many of the people they supposedly serve (autistic persons and their families) are filing for bankruptcy and skipping meals and paying outrageous medical expenses on a regular basis.
The one that the person forwarding the e-mail to me drew to our attention was Dr. Geraldine Dawson, the Chief Science Officer (written as Geri Dawson on the form). $644,264?!
The 990 reports that about $270,000 of her compensation was a one-time relocation expense. OK, so that reduces her ‘normal’ annual compensation to about $370,000. Two comments – 1) This is supposed to make us feel better?, and 2) OK, who on earth needs $270,000 to move? What did they do, buy a teleporter and beam it there? Hire hundreds of laid-off parents to carry everything and walk it there?
If my math works out right, 16 people combined to make $3.1 million dollars at Autism Speaks last year – an average of close to $200,000 per person. That would sure buy a lot of therapy and supplies, and for that matter cover a lot of food, debt, and rent or mortgage payments.
Way down near the end, they added a paragraph about how they based their compensation off of other nonprofits, instituted compensation structures based on similar nonprofits, they seek to pay people competitively, etc. Everybody says this, and anyone can justify their compensation plan based on data from somewhere. This sounds almost verbatim like the justifications used for exorbitant compensation packages paid out to bank CEOs. And such justifications to me are absolutely irrelevant to the conversation. How about this rule instead:
Look at what you pay to your highest-paid people and then look at the people you serve and ask yourself, is this morally consistent with our mission and the needs of the people we seek to help?
Clearly you can tell how I feel about this. To me this is like reason #27 that I have strong, negative feelings about Autism Speaks. But, make up your own mind. Read the 990 and decide for yourself.
But with autism-related nonprofits sprouting up all over the place, this issue transcends Autism Speaks. We should develop an ethic for all nonprofits who devote their mission to autism for not only basic principles of using donations wisely and effectively, but also in how we honor, respect, and value autistic persons and those that love them. Budgets and financial reports are documents that reflect our ethics and what is most important to us. We can say all the right words, but this is where our commitment is proven or not.
If I have erred in my analysis here, let me know and I’ll correct it.
Posts that hopefully are similar:
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- Happy World Autism Awareness Day!
- What do parents of autistic kids want?
- Can We Throw Rain Man Down the Memory Hole?
- Stop the Screaming
- The Autistic Terminator!?
- What Blogging for a Year Has Taught Us
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m more of a 2 + 2 person myself but it’s useful to have a comparison. I do know that non-profits ‘have to’ offer competitive salaries in order to attract well qualified candidates but even so……
Maddy – I think I’m about to write a comment that is more an excuse for me to pontificate some more on this issue than it is a response to what you actually wrote. My apologies in advance.
I’m a fair amount less directly involved in the nonprofit world now than I used to be, but salaries will always be a controversial topic there. I know among the rank-and-file employees, having a consistent pay policy is very important, especially since most of the time they make a pretty modest wage. But passion in and personal fulfillment gained from participating in the mission is at least as important a part of the ‘compensation’ package. I was attracted not by the salary offer but by the mission. When the focus of one’s employment or hiring is largely or solely on money, I think everybody ends up losing out.
I guess my question is, how much money is enough?
It seems like the best leaders would look at it like, “how much value am I contributing to this organization as a leader?” instead of “is my pay comparable to the Vice-President of Organization A?” The former is mission-centric, the latter is ego-centric, and the organizations that live with leaders in the latter category almost always suffer for it. I’ve seen it too many times. Those values may work out to be the same number or they may not, though I can’t even come up with a scenario in which some of those salaries are appropriate. Regardless, I still think how you ask the question matters.
I’ll never accept the reasoning that some people give that “this is how the world works.” You can find great people with incredible skill all over the place. One of the lessons autism has taught me is that as a society we allocate value and personal worth all wrong. And it seems like doing things the same way they’ve been done is the last thing we need right now.
OK – I’ve gone on plenty long enough.
Why not make copies of this and hand them out at Autism Speaks walkathons? That would certainly target those who are directly involved in supporting such abuses. Talk is cheap actions are efficient.
Tim,
I cannot say that this entirely surprises me, as Autism Speaks’ intentions have never come within the same sport as honourable. In fact it would not be out of character for them to be trying to exploit the autistic for financial gain. I mean, sure, if you are going to try and eliminate a group of people from the world, why not steal from them in the bargain?
There’s a few things about charity people should know in order to better understand just how much of a problem this is to the autistic.
One is that the conservative claim that welfare can be replaced by charity is flat-out and utter rubbish. Not only is there a serious mismatch between how well-funded charities are and who needs their services, Americans would need to increase their charitable contributions tenfold in order to replace the money that is taken in tax by the government and redistributed as welfare. The autistic should not be holding out their hands to charities at all (especially not in light of what the existing ones intend), but rather petitioning the government for funds to be allocated to services that might benefit them. Incentives for workplaces to hire autistic adults, rent control, medicinal subsidy, and other such forms of welfare spring to mind.
Another problem with charity is that charities are much more able to sidestep accountability not only to the people they claim to serve but also the government. Open articles in magazines have been published about how some celebrities set up charity foundations more as a tax dodge than genuine altruism. And if a government department acted in such total contradiction to its clientele’s will as Autism Speaks does for long enough, it would be shut down and replaced with another.
Finally, charities are by their nature bound to the locales that they are based in. A charity in New York cannot reallocate resources to help people in need in California because the New York-based donors would raise hell, and the charity’s actual resources cannot be moved too far out of its locale, either. While services for the autistic are somewhat reasonable if one lives in a populated city, I can say from personal experience that being diagnosed in adulthood as autistic when you are living in a more remote location quickly turns into one of the most soul-crushing drains of your spirit that you will ever experience. The only person I would wish anything similar on is Suzanne Wright, mainly because she deserves it. Welfare, on the other hand, is not bound by such localisation issues. Tax revenues collected in a major city can be distributed to a recipient in a town of twenty people (and vice versa, it has to be said).
What would be nice is if an autistic adult could do a Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and tell their federal government both what the problem is and how allocation of government funding was needed yesterday. But of course getting them to listen without waving money in their faces is another matter.
Oh yeah, and another uncomfortable fact about charity is that charitable contributions to a given organisation tend to originate from persons who might reasonably expect something in return. People who have cancer patients in their family tend to donate to cancer foundations, people who have diabetes in their family tend to donate to diabetes foundations, and so forth. Thus, it is logical to believe that Autism Speaks has bilked that 66 million dollars out of families that have autistic members, and are unaware of what the autistic think of them. Although how a person can go on YouTube and search for Autism Speaks for more than half an hour without becoming acutely aware that Autism Speaks is probably the only charity claiming to represent people who actively hate their guts is beyond me, really.
Geri sounds like a man’s name! Why? Is she ashamed to be a women practicing this shameless scavenging in this bad men’s world. Equal opportunism is knocking on women’s door and more and more of them are crossing that wretched greedy threshold and becoming more and more like the worst of men. A person who pries on handicapped children and their families is among the most despicable of human beings. But when a woman does it, she nulls and voids the mother of us all. I am ashamed to be of the same specie as this woman. May the Goddess recall this type of femininity!
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