March 11, 1999 | Read Time: 1 minute
The Law of Tax-Exempt Organizations, Seventh Edition
By Bruce R. Hopkins
This perennial resource offers more than 900 pages of legal guidance for any organization eligible to acquire or trying to maintain tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service.
The latest version is also a slimmer version, having dropped 13 chapters since the publication of the sixth edition in 1992.
Those pages were incorporated into a separate book, Private Foundations: Tax Law and Compliance, written by Jody Blazek and Mr. Hopkins, a lawyer in Kansas City, Mo., who specializes in representing non-profit organizations.
Though truncated, this edition still provides detailed information on the rules that govern non-profit groups and private foundations.
Mr. Hopkins begins by introducing the reader to the advantages and disadvantages of tax exemption, and follows with sections on how several types of tax-exempt groups are defined under federal and state laws. He examines how recent court rulings and changes in legislation have affected the way tax-exempt organizations operate.
He explains such terms as private inurement, fund-raising disclosure, unrelated business income taxation, and joint ventures.
Each chapter, whether it notes a decision affecting social-services charities or examines the chronology of an I.R.S. audit, is packed with footnotes that refer to relevant tax-court decisions, private-letter rulings, or memoranda issued by the tax agency that affect the law.
Appendixes include definitions of the many sections of the Internal Revenue Code, a list of the 63 categories under which the I.R.S. classifies tax-exempt groups, and tables of cases, rulings, and determinations referred to in the text.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, One Wiley Drive, Somerset, N.J. 08875; (800) 225-5945; fax (908) 302-2300 or (800) 597-3299; World-Wide Web http://www.wiley.com; 930 pages; $155 plus $8 postage and handling; I.S.B.N. 0-471-19629-0.
