March 26, 1998 | Read Time: 1 minute
The Internal Revenue Service will not be spending a lot of time and money auditing small private foundations in the immediate future, according to Marc Owens, director of the I.R.S.’s Exempt Organizations Division.
Mr. Owens, in a speech at Organization Management Inc.’s annual conference, said a recently completed review by the I.R.S. of small private foundations showed that most are in compliance with tax laws.
“There are no real systemic problems,” said Mr. Owens. As a result, “I don’t think we’ll be looking at too many small private foundations,” he said. “We’ve got other areas where we know there are problems.”
While the study looked specifically at small foundations, Mr. Owens said that “the sample was intended to give us data from which we could extrapolate the behavior of the larger universe of foundations.”
Mr. Owens said the service would probably publish the results of the foundation study in its next handbook for tax agents. Last year the handbook was canceled because of budget cuts at the I.R.S., but Mr. Owens said he hoped it would resume publication this fall.
