Prentice, “Misreporting Nonprofit Lobbying Engagement and Expenses: Charitable Regulation and Managerial Discretion”

November 29, 2018

ARNOVA’s (Association for Research on Nonprofits and Voluntary Action) Nonprofit Policy Forum (Volume 9 (2018) (I think your law library has to have an electronic subscription) has an interesting article by Christopher Prentice on how nonprofits [mis]report lobbying activities and expenses. Here is the abstract:

Abstract:

On the one hand, nonprofits are expected to protect values, promote ideals, and effect change, and on the other hand, they are normatively and legally discouraged from engaging in advocacy and lobbying. These countervailing forces produce a tension that nonprofit managers must navigate. Although previous research suggests that normative boundaries and legal implications constrain lobbying efforts, it is possible that these factors merely influence how some charities report their lobbying activities to authorities. Indeed, incentives to misreport lobbying engagement exist at the federal level where regulatory oversight is lax. This article compares state data obtained for a sample of charities to contemporaneous federal data regarding the lobbying engagement, payments, and expenses of these organizations and their registered lobbyists. Findings demonstrate that roughly half of the charities sampled engage in more lobbying than they report to federal authorities, lending support to the premise that managerial discretion influences nonprofit reporting.