Description
The class will have organized into groups, each of which will select a case of nonprofit financial mismanagement. You can choose from this collection of nonprofit scandals gathered by the Nonprofit Quarterly (see https://nonprofitquarterly.org/category/corruption-scandals/), or you can look elsewhere for that information if you prefer.
Each group is a separate team of policy analysts and auditors for the Massachusetts Nonprofit Consortium, a fictional organization that evaluates nonprofit finances. Each group will be making a presentation about their selected organization to an imagined state legislative oversight committee (consisting in real life of the class as a whole).
Each group should try to locate the selected organization’s most recent IRS Form 990.This information should be available at https://www.guidestar.org/. Individual group members should be able to access that information after establishing a free Guidestar account.
Also, each group should try to locate the organization’s most recent audited financial statements. Those statements can often be found online.
Each group should:
1. Research the selected nonprofit organization’s mission and key policy and financial issues that the agency experienced.
2. Identify financial policies and practices the agency pursued that led to its financial problems.
3. On a spreadsheet, chart the organization’s revenues and expenses, total assets and liabilities, and yearly cash flow amounts, as listed on the Form 990s and the financial statements, if available.
4. Develop a series of findings regarding the organization’s financial viability and the reasons for its financial and related problems.
5. Recommend policy initiatives and corrective measures for the selected organization and for other similar nonprofit organizations.
6. Recommend measures that should be taken by legislative or other oversight entities to prevent similar problems from happening to other nonprofit organizations.
Each group’s final project should include a four-page memo (submitted as a Word document) to the chair of the legislative committee, listing the results of your background research on the organization and the group’s findings and recommendations. Each group should also produce a PowerPoint presentation for the committee members as a whole.
Each group’s memo and PowerPoint should be submitted to the Moodle assignment link
