The charitable sector is vulnerable to fraud losses, with these losses negatively impacting the organization’s reputation, future funding, and ability to advance its mission. Research on nonprofit fraud is relatively scarce, due mainly to limited availability of data. We create a database that summarizes and describes basic facts (nature and timing of fraud, description of organization, magnitude of loss, and perpetrators) for 115 incidents of detected fraud occurring in U.S. nonprofit organizations. We find a disproportionately high incidence of nonprofit fraud in the Health and Human Services National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities Groups, a high percentage of females committing misappropriation frauds, and that the organizational role of the perpetrator is related to the size of the fraud loss. We also investigate whether organizations detecting a nonprofit fraud report this information, as required, on Internal Revenue Service Form 990, and find that many organizations do not comply.

This study examines the survival of nonprofit organizations after the discovery of a fraud. Literature on nonprofit fraud claims that fraud has a destructive impact on nonprofit organizations. This study is the first to provide empirical evidence of the impact of fraud on a nonprofit organization's survival, and to analyze the significance of underlying organizational and fraud factors. An analysis of 115 nonprofit organizations experiencing a fraud shows that over one fourth of these organizations did not survive at least 3 years beyond the publication of the fraud, a rate considerably higher than the typical nonprofit failure rate. This article investigates the characteristics of surviving organizations and finds that older and larger organizations are more likely to survive, indicating the liabilities of newness and smallness hold in fraud survival situations. In cases where an executive‐level perpetrator committed the fraud, or where the organization victimized the public, the organization was less likely to survive. These findings suggest nonprofit organizations, particularly those that are new or small, could benefit by implementing governance policies and procedures that are consistent with those employed by more established organizations.

No abstract

No abstract

Internal Revenue Code §183 generally prohibits taxpayers from deducting expenses related to activities in which the taxpayer is not primarily motivated by profit. The applicable Treasury Regulation provides nine specific factors to consider in determining if a taxpayer's activity is motivated primarily by profit. This paper reviews the United States Tax Court's application of the nine factors in a sample of decisions reported between 2005 and 2015, inclusive, investigating potential inconsistencies between the Regulation language and observed outcomes. We find that a taxpayer successfully demonstrating three factors has a 158 percent greater probability of winning than a taxpayer demonstrating only two factors. We also observe that operating in a businesslike manner is a key factor to taxpayer success. Finally, we show that pro se taxpayers generally fare worse than represented ones, although the marginal reward to an additional favorable factor may be higher for them than for represented taxpayers.