A compliance revolution is about to take place in America’s not-for-profit sector. The result may well be that corporate executives who serve on not-for-profit boards will face compliance challenges in their charitable endeavors just as challenging as those they face in their 9-to-5 lives—if not more so. And the revolution is being led by what many consider Washington’s most powerful government agency: the IRS.
To those of us who followed the corporate scandals of Enron, WorldCom, and Adelphia at the beginning of the decade, the pattern is eerily familiar. Those corporate governance failures sparked legislative reforms such as Sarbanes-Oxley and regulatory ...