ACR NEWSLETTER

ACR @ the 2011 Philanthropy Roundtable Annual Meeting

Event Recap

This week, Consider This is preempted by a recap of the Alliance for Charitable Reform’s presence at the 2011 Philanthropy Roundtable annual meeting.

Themed Can-Do Philanthropy: Solving America’s Greatest Challenges, this year’s annual meeting explored how private independent giving can—and does—solve America’s greatest challenges. In his opening address, Roundtable president Adam Meyerson reminded the audience that despite the achievements of philanthropy there are serious dangers facing charitable giving including economic stagnation, over-regulation of the charitable sector, and an assault on the charitable deduction by the current Administration. These persistent threats make necessary the vigilance and efforts of ACR, the Roundtable’s public policy arm, to preserve the charitable deduction and protect the freedom of donors and foundations.

On Friday (October 28th), J.D. Foster, policy fellow with the Heritage Foundation, joined Sue Santa, senior vice president for public policy at the Roundtable, and ACR executive director Sandra Swirski for the hot topic session: Super Committee, Tax Reform, Deficit Reduction: What You Need to Know Now.” As you know, nothing has dominated conversations about the country’s financial future quite like the congressional “Super Committee” and their expected recommendations on how Congress can reduce the country’s deficit. After navigating donors through the dire financial trajectory of the country, Foster and Swirski reviewed recommendations from the House and Senate tax-writing Committees to the Super Committee, their likelihood of being adopted, and the impact of the Super Committee’s final recommendations on charitable incentives and philanthropy. Santa then turned to the states where she highlighted risks to the charitable sector including attempts by lawmakers to extract new revenue and actions by aggressive attorneys general.

On Saturday (October 29th), legal and tax experts shined light on the subject of government mandated transparency for donors in the session “Philanthropic Transparency: All, Nothing, or Something in Between.” John Tyler, vice president and corporate counsel at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and co-author of the Roundtable’s legal analysis “How Public is Private Philanthropy: Separating Fact from Myth,” teamed up with Suzanne Garment, visiting scholar at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University and editor of the same essay, to continue the conversation from last year’s annual meeting on voluntary disclosure efforts by foundations. Joining them this year was Marcus Owen, former director of the Exempt Organizations Division of the Internal Revenue Service and now a member of the law firm Caplin & Drysdale. The panel examined degrees of openness mandated by law and the reasons for such mandates. Panelists agreed that government has a legitimate role in demanding transparency in furtherance of enforcing existing law.  But they cautioned that governments could seek to expand authority beyond those limits. The discussion revealed some of the dangers that lurk behind these efforts, why the philanthropic sector would not be well served if government succeeded in these goals, and what can donors do about it.

We now look ahead to our annual ACR Summit for Leaders, which we are pleased to announce will take place on Wednesday, March 21st, 2012 in Washington, D.C. More details to follow.