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26 Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Q. 5 (1997)

handle is hein.journals/npvolsq26 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITORIAL Taxing Nonprofits Carl Milofsky Bucknell University Recently, someone wrote to the ARNOVA Listserve (the computer bulletin board of our parent association) about a piece of state legislation that would make it easier for nonprofits to be taxed by localities. After the usual fusillade of concerned statements about the declining condition of nonprofit organiza- tions, someone wrote suggesting that members of the listserve should begin a letter-writing campaign in an effort to convince legislators not to pass the bill. Although all of this seems reasonable enough given that audience of re- searchers and practitioners devoted to nonprofit organizations, it brought me up short because it showed how overtly members of this community present themselves as lobbyists for the nonprofit organizations' cause. I do not mean to present myself as some ivory tower intellectual who is above politics. My problem, rather, comes from a discussion that arose within our local Nonprofit Assistance Center (NAC) on this topic. Readers may or may not know that Pennsylvania, where I live, is a national leader in auditing and taxing nonprofits. I had been talking with an attorney who, as a parent associated with a local private school, was asked to help respond to a $19,000 tax bill that this little school with 50 students and a $100,000 annual budget had received from the local tax assessor. A free-lance auditor had approached the local public school district suggesting that he assess every corporate entity in town for back taxes owed on a business privilege tax on gross revenues allowed by the Commonwealth. Challenges to these assessments would be heard in local courts, and the lack of clear precedents at either the local or state level meant the results of a court challenge were unclear. My attorney friend asked if I knew anybody at the state level who could tell him how other nonprofits had responded to such assessment efforts. Helping him out seemed like a good project for our NAC, and at our next meeting of the coordinating committee I brought this up, suggesting that this might also be a good way of drumming up business for our fledgling operation because many small nonprofits in our area would no doubt be severely taxed-OK, severely challenged--by similar assessments. Nonprofit and Voluntary Secter Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, March 1997 5-10 0 1997 Sage Publications, Inc. 5 from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.

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