A legal audit is an overview of an organization’s non-financial compliance, governance and risk management issues. Organizations typically consider a legal audit when new management takes over and wants to ensure they are starting with a clean slate or the in the wake of a costly mistake.
Black’s Law Dictionary, 9th ed., defines an endowment as: A gift of money or property to an institution (such as a university) for a specific
The new tax laws continue 2020 CARES Act changes that increase the above-the-line individual tax deduction to $300. In addition, the new rules double the deduction for married couples filing jointly to $600; the 2020 CARES Act did not have a provision that permitted couples to claim an additional amount over individual filers. Donations must be made in cash (rather than stocks or other assets like cars and clothing; credit cards and checks are OK) and go directly to a charity (donor-advised funds and private non-operating foundations do not count).
Too often, we see nonprofits signing contracts that are presented to them by vendors without appropriate legal review. Many vendors use form contracts that are extremely one sided in the vendor’s favor on the theory that many clients will sign whatever is given to them without scrutinizing the terms.
From time to time, charities are faced with what to do with a restricted gift when the terms of the donor’s restriction can no longer be fulfilled. The doctrine of cy pres permits the courts to modify the charitable purpose of a charitable trust to a purpose that reasonably approximates the designated purpose, where the designated charitable purpose becomes unlawful, impossible, or impracticable to carry out or where it becomes wasteful to apply all of the property to the designated purpose.
The Pension Protection Act of 2006 (“Act”) offered the first definition of a donor-advised fund. According to the Act, a fund must have the following three characteristics to be a donor-advised fund, and if any of these characteristics is missing, the fund is not a donor-advised fund.
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