According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the House Ways and Means Committee is planning to hold hearings based on committee chair Charles Rangel’s (D-NY) interest in asking “nonprofit organizations to show why they deserve to be tax-exempt and what they do to help the poor and elderly.”[1] That sounds very tough, akin to his predecessor, Bill Thomas’s (R-CA), frequent and pointed inquiries into what nonprofit hospitals were doing to merit their status as nonprofits.[2]

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New York State’s new attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, recently got the nation’s largest student-loan dispenser known, Sallie Mae, to pay a $2 million penalty for providing various incentives to nonprofit colleges for signing up their students as borrowers—Note: Like Fannie, Sallie was established as a GSE in 1972 to facilitate a secondary market in student loans, but it went fully private in 2004, unlike the sort of hybrid existence of for-profit GSEs such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In some cases uncovered by AG Cuomo, collegiate financial aid directors accepted personal loans, shares of stock, and compensated advisory board positions with other student loan providers; Sallie Mae however said that it only paid college advisory board members for “soda and cookies,” we kid you not.

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Whatever one might have thought of the Fannie Mae Foundation, itself the subject of some critical scrutiny in the press for its astronomical executive salary levels (the Foundation’s CEO took home almost $650,000 in salary and compensation according to the foundation’s 2005 990PF filing), its absorption of much of the advertising budget of the corporation (per a deal that was struck by former president Bill Clinton allowing Fannie to consider its for-profit-related advertising a charitable activity), and intimations that the foundation slanted its grantmaking to curry political favor for the corporation.

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It still takes the equivalent of Sam Spade to track corporate philanthropy, since so much of it occurs as “direct” corporate giving rather than publicly disclosed grantmaking through corporate foundations that have to file 990PFs. The nonprofit sector is still gunshy about asking corporate America for full corporate disclosure, despite lots of evidence of lots of perfidy in the purported charitiable activities of corporate scions. The latest revelations about corporate philanthropy come from Senators Baucus and Grassley at the Senate Finance Committee.

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