November 16, 2000 | Read Time: 2 minutes
By HAIM WATZMAN
As Israelis are increasingly being encouraged to give to charity, new tools are making it easier for them to learn about the organizations seeking help.
Eliezer D. Jaffe, a long-standing investigator of Israeli nonprofit organizations
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and an indefatigable critic of government policy in the nonprofit world, has just crowned 40 years of labor in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s school of social work. He has established a Web site that indexes each of the country’s 28,000 registered nonprofit groups (12,000 of which are certified to offer donors tax deductions) as well as its foundations and other grant makers.
The Web site, http://www.givingwisely.org.il, was based on the database maintained by Israel’s registrar of nonprofit organizations and was supplemented by responses to questionnaires Mr. Jaffe distributed to the registered charitable groups.
Government Rules
While the site will go a long way toward helping donors receive more information, Mr. Jaffe says that it will be hard for Israelis to be well-informed about charitable organizations until the government takes steps to simplify complex registration and reporting rules.
Three different ministries — finance, interior, and justice — register different kinds of nonprofit groups, and the main registrar, in the Interior Ministry, doesn’t have enough staff members to ensure that all registered organizations are abiding by their legal obligations, including the submission of annual financial statements.
Mr. Jaffe estimates that more than a third of the organizations are dormant or have not filed regular reports.
Furthermore, the tax authorities do not allow the public to see the financial statements of the nonprofit groups that are eligible to offer tax breaks. Mr. Jaffe says the public — and nonprofit organizations themselves — would be better served if a government authority were established specifically to oversee nonprofit organizations and monitor release of information about their operations.
While some charity leaders might worry that increased obligations to report financial and other information would be burdensome, Mr. Jaffe says he is not out to strangle nonprofit organizations but to strengthen them. He himself is chairman of a Jerusalem charitable group that offers interest-free loans to families with financial difficulties, and he says he knows what happens when potential donors don’t have information: They simply won’t give.
