January 12, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
I work for the Missouri attorney general’s office, and for years I have coordinated its regulation of nonprofits. One day I was explaining to a group of nonprofit experts what regulators like me do, and I rattled off a list of cases from Missouri and from my neighbors in Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, and elsewhere. When finished, they couldn’t believe the number —and those were just ones I knew off the top of the head.
At that moment, it occurred to me that most people running nonprofits don’t understand how active their attorneys general are, or even what those officials are supposed to do. Yet we have the power to dissolve whole organizations, require them to act in certain ways, remove their directors, and take numerous other actions.
A few high-profile cases handled by attorneys general do make the news, such as the state of Tennessee’s negotiations with Fisk University over its desire to sell an art collection it inherited from Georgia O’Keeffe. Most of our actions aren’t reported even though they have profound effects on the nonprofits involved—and could have the same consequences for other nonprofits.
In most states, the law says the attorney general is the guardian of charities and charitable assets. In short, we’re the watchdogs. But what do we do? Where do we come from? How do we guard the public interest? And when and how do we dissolve a nonprofit or give you a new set of directors? Those are the kinds of questions we will seek to answer in our blog posts.
We’ll discuss the myriad actions that states take against nonprofits and try to help you avoid getting stuck in similar situations. We also hope our perspective can inspire you to improve what you do and to go beyond the mere legal minimum required of nonprofits. We hope we can provide insight into what the regulators see and what we believe merits government action.
Each week my colleagues throughout the country and I will post our thoughts about current matters of concern. But we want this to be a conversation, so we urge you to tell us how you perceive our actions and how we can better help nonprofits achieve their potential. Don’t worry that you’ll offend us with anything you post – as government officials, we’ve already been called every name in the book.
