Is Your Board Effective? An Empirical Analysis of Nonprofit Organizations and How Their Board Contributed to Fraud

Abstract

Purpose In any organization, the Board of Directors acts as the last line of defense against fraud and abuse. Since 2008, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has required nonprofit organizations to publicly disclose any significant asset diversion, defined as theft or unauthorized use of assets, that occurred during the filing year. This research study uses this new disclosure of asset diversion to investigate whether proper board policy oversight and/or governance reduces the likelihood of asset diversion. Understanding how policy and governance impacts a nonprofit organization is critical for managers and practitioners to understand. Organizational management, board members and regulatory agencies (auditors, IRS) all have a responsibility to prevent asset diversion and would benefit from a deeper understanding of where the individual failure points exist from within the organization that create an increased chance of asset diversion. Research Methodology This research study spanned the period between 2014 through 2018 and was comprised of 254 nonprofit organizations. The total sample of organizations that were represented in the IRS data sets consisted of 113,899 separate nonprofit organizations. Organizational data collected from IRS 990 filings across each of the 5 years was first isolated by organizations that experienced asset diversion (n=127) and then matched with an equal number of nonprofit organizations that did not experience asset diversion through random sampling. From the IRS filing data, 18 different variables were then tested against the dependent variable, asset diversion, using logistic binary regression analysis. Findings The findings of this study both reaffirmed certain key aspects of asset diversion in nonprofit organizations as well as introduced new key variables that showed significant correlation with an increase in asset diversion. The findings suggest that there are variables from both board policy oversight and board governance regression analysis that show a significant relationship with asset diversion. More specifically, there were three common variables that showed significance throughout each test: organizational required audit, independent auditors, and improper party transaction with family members of current or former directors and/or officers of the organization. One additional variable, improper party transaction with an entity owned or operated by a current or former officer and/or director, showed significance in four of the five models tested, indicating that there is a strong correlation with increasing asset diversion. Keywords: fraud, asset diversion, nonprofit, binary regression, Board of Directors, IRS 990 filing