News-Record.com

My colleague Stan Swofford had a story in today's N&R about the state of the criminal investigation of defunct housing nonprofit Project Homestead and its finances. Short version: It's about a year old and might last another three months.

For me, this story was deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra is reputed to have said. I spent the better part of three years covering PTL for the N&R, starting just weeks after Jim Bakker's resignation (which happened on my next-to-last day at my previous paper) and continuing through Bakker's indictment, trial and sentencing to the civil suit that disappeared a Big 8 accounting firm and left tens of thousands of PTL donors holding nothing but pixie dust.

The parallels are obvious: A charity, founded by a charismatic religious leader with political influence (fun fact: during Reagan's second term, then-V.P. George H.W. Bush sought Bakker's support for the 1988 GOP presidential nomination), veers off into error as donors' funds -- private money in the case of PTL; taxpayer money in Homestead's case -- are misspent. Finally, it all becomes public just months before the charity would have collapsed financially anyway because of the insatiable greed of its leader. The ensuing financial investigation goes on for many months before being resolved. The only real difference is that with Homestead, the dollar amounts had one or two fewer zeroes on the ends.

One of the more educational spectacles of Bakker's criminal trial was the sight of former PTL board members, some of them celebrities, called to testify that, in fact, they had no idea what Bakker was up to or how well or poorly money was being managed. These witnesses were, in effect, lectured by the prosecutors that it was their job to know.

I bring this up because this town has a lot of charitable nonprofits, and all (presumably) of these nonprofits have boards. If you're not on one, you probably know someone who is. How many of these board members understand their legal obligations, their fiduciary responsibilities? And of those who understand, how many actually are carrying them out? I'm not trying to scare off any current or would-be board members. But you need to understand what you're getting into.

If you're on a nonprofit board and you think you might not know everything you need to know, a good starting point is the BoardSource Web site. Educate yourself, and then hold your nonprofit's CEO accountable. A tax exemption is a public trust. It's up to you to see that it gets used accordingly, because if it turns out that your nonprofit's CEO is taking money or doing something else illegal, and you didn't know because you weren't asking the right questions and looking at the right paperwork, your subsequent conversations with government representatives are going to be extremely unpleasant.