Opinion Article on Planned Giving Was ‘Erroneous’

To the Editor:

In his opinion piece, “Why Planned Giving Is in Big Trouble” (March 20), Doug White takes the membership of the National Committee on Planned Giving to task on several counts. As the organization’s elected president, it is incumbent upon me, on behalf of NCPG’s Board of Directors, to dispel Mr. White’s misleading and erroneous contentions regarding the ethical standards of NCPG and our over 11,000 individual and council members.

The mission of the National Committee on Planned Giving is to increase the quality and quantity of charitable planned gifts by serving as the voice and professional resource for the gift-planning community. The first tenet of this mission emphasizes the “quality” of planned gifts. What are the two primary traits of a quality planned gift? That it be completed ethically and competently.

In supporting this mission, the gift-planning community’s guiding light is the Model Standards of Practice for the Charitable Gift Planner, the ethical code developed by NCPG in 1991 and written specifically to guide our members on issues of ethical gift-planning practice. All NCPG councils and individual members must agree to abide by these standards as a condition of membership. It is testament to the weight these model standards carry that many charities have incorporated them into their development policies.

NCPG’s record in promoting ethical education and discussion is a strong one. Our Web site has a section devoted to professional ethics and standards, we publish a regular column on ethics in The Journal of Gift Planning, we incorporate ethics in our educational offerings, we work with state and federal regulators on issues of abuse of laws affecting our profession, and we collaborate with other philanthropic organizations on ethics issues that cross professional constituencies.

I cannot resist the temptation to mention here that since the beginning of this year I have already addressed two NCPG councils — in Southern California and Nebraska — on the topic of ethics in our profession and practical application of the model standards in our daily practice of gift planning. And I will continue to do so at every opportunity during my tenure.

Perhaps most important, NCPG encourages our member councils to provide ethics education and to address ethical violations in their home communities, which were Mr. White’s own recommendations as the appropriate role for NCPG, made when he served as NCPG’s Ethics Committee chair in 1994.

NCPG places ethics so highly on our agenda that our Ethics Committee is our largest leadership body outside of our Board of Directors, and its membership consists of past presidents of NCPG — individuals with a wealth of gift-planning expertise and a diversity of backgrounds and experience who have earned the respect of their peers, evidenced through their election and service in leadership of this organization.

NCPG disagrees with Mr. White’s premise that “most people look at ethics as the soft underbelly of planned giving.” And we take offense at the suggestion that members of NCPG are “ethical midgets.” NCPG has been blessed with excellent leadership, both in a staff and volunteer capacity, that works hard together to protect the integrity of this profession.

Mr. White did not limit himself to attacking NCPG and its record on promoting ethics in the profession — he also questioned the qualifications and effectiveness of our chief executive officer. This is not the proper forum to pursue such a discussion, so I will simply say that her distinguished record in helping to build this dynamic organization from its early days speaks for itself.

I am proud and deeply honored to lead an organization whose members seek to perform at the highest standards of competence and ethics and who appreciate the continuing efforts of NCPG and our councils to provide a context for their ethical decision making.

Chris Yates
President
National Committee on Planned Giving
Director of Gift and Estate Planning
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, Calif.

To the Editor:

The field of planned giving is alive and thriving despite one man’s opinion.

It is naïve to suggest that the National Committee on Planned Giving is culpable for the ethical lapses of people working in this field. Ethicists tell us that principled behavior on the job is primarily a matter of personal values and choices, and then secondarily a reflection of the culture of the organization that employs the person.

The specious assertion that planned-giving practitioners are part of a profession is misplaced. By design, and for practical reasons, there are no standard examinations, registrations, or mandated education requirements, and NCPG leaders understand this by providing a forum for collegial education. It is appropriate that the field is wide open for entry and inclusive of development officers, attorneys, accountants, and trust and financial specialists who wish to create lasting relationships with prospective donors. Ethical conflicts are exceptionally rare and adequately handled under state and federal law.

The writer reveals his limited experience in this field in speaking only to those planned gifts made by donors who claim income-tax deductions. The fact is that such planned gifts are eclipsed every year (perhaps in value by a factor of 25) by the primary technique of planned giving, the beneficiary designation for charity made in wills, living trusts, life-insurance policies, financial accounts, and retirement plans. The best people working in the field today know this and support the NCPG.

Tom Cullinan
Director
National Planned Giving Institute
College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, Va.

To the Editor:

Having just finished reading Mr. White’s commentary on the ethics of planned-giving fund raisers, I am confused about why our profession is in trouble. Several valid points were brought forward, but the article quickly left the informative and instructive behind and became, what appeared to be, a personal quest to change the National Committee on Planned Giving.

As I read, I kept looking for the evidence that there is a moral or ethical problem in our field, but found no such evidence. Mr. White just kept telling us there was a problem without demonstrating what the problem is. The Model Standards of Practice for the Charitable Gift Planner, developed by NCPG, are well thought out and provide a valuable road map for someone practicing in the area of planned giving.

From both my personal experience and participation in Chicago Council of Planned Giving events, I find no evidence that planned giving is in big trouble. To the contrary, I find it an exciting time to be involved in this aspect of financial development.

Perhaps most importantly, I do not look toward any national organization to be held accountable for how my institution or its employees deal with donors. That is my responsibility and the responsibility of the institutional culture we have created and the values that are core to our operations.

The state of planned giving is far more a function of how all of our combined institutions operate on a daily basis than of how our national organization operates. Is the National Committee on Planned Giving perfect? Probably not. Is planned giving in bad shape because of the organization? My experience says no. My professional experience tells me that planned giving is alive and well.

Kent C. Weimer
Planned-Giving Director
Office of Planned Giving
John G. Shedd Aquarium
Chicago

To the Editor:

I found the opinion piece by Doug White to be entirely inappropriate. To level an accusation that the whole planned-giving profession is rife with unethical practitioners, in fact with people who don’t even understand what the word means, is offensive and unjustified. Mr. White apparently views himself as one of the few people (perhaps only person) involved in the gift-planning enterprise in one way or another who has adequate credentials (whatever they may be) to call himself “ethical.”

To be sure, there is no beginning or end to the debate about ethics — what they are, how we acquire them, how they should be applied. But to castigate a whole profession as being woefully unfit ethically, and even dangerous because in his estimation not enough is “officially” being done at the National Committee on Planned Giving to promote this vital facet of our business, is reprehensible. To so blatantly skew reality to fit his particular agenda smacks of unethical connotations in itself, not to mention the deliberate and unabashed free advertising at the end of his diatribe.

Edward J. McBride
Director of Gift Planning
University of Idaho
Moscow

To the Editor:

While some of the points raised by Mr. White have merit, I believe the overall thrust of his piece is disturbing and could be destructive to fund-raising efforts at a time when the fund-raising community faces real and unprecedented challenges.

To read Mr. White’s remarks, one would think that the majority of planned-giving officers in America are drafting trusts and giving financial advice, with their institutions serving as trustee and potentially mismanaging donor assets. This is demonstrably not the case. In fact, the majority of many planned-giving officers’ time is spent in the process of building and stewarding donor relationships. In my experience, planned-giving officers tend to be among the most highly educated and seasoned members of a fund-raising staff. Like Mr. White, they often have had distinguished previous careers in law, the ministry, trust administration, teaching, and other professions that maintain strong professional standards. Many of them belong to professional associations that serve various segments of the nonprofit sectors, and they are governed by the ethical codes of those groups.

NCPG has not ignored the issue of ethics. A visit to its Web site makes it clear that ethics are of paramount concern to the organization. Each person who joins NCPG is required to accept the NCPG model standards when they join. These standards express the consensus of the membership about a number of issues that are peculiar to gift planning, including a prohibition against marketing gifts as tax shelters.

Fortunately, however, in areas where planned gifts involve representations regarding possible investment performance and similar aspects of a particular gift vehicle, Congress has in its wisdom extended the reach of securities laws to make it crystal clear that it is a crime to misrepresent planned gifts, not simply an area that is the province of voluntary ethical codes — rendering much of Mr. White’s concerns moot.

Finally, Mr. White offers a utopian vision of a professional board of overseers led by someone who is anointed by peers to serve for a long period of time and empowered to interpret and dictate “ethical behavior.” The NCPG board is elected and serves for a period of time that is typical in governance of trade groups and professional associations. The majority of NCPG’s leaders serve as senior partners in law firms, heads of trust departments, and planned-giving executives with extensive and diverse experience. These are not the “ethical midgets” Mr. White references in his piece, nor are the members of the planned-giving councils nationwide that chose them to fulfill their leadership roles.

The members of NCPG are collectively the stewards of the vision of the organization and elect the board to implement their vision. The CEO and staff of NCPG are a highly professional group of people who follow the dictates of the board, not vice versa.

In the bio at the end of his remarks, it says that Mr. White is a former chair of NCPG’s Ethics Committee. Subsequent to his period of service, the membership of NCPG decided through a democratic process that it would entrust ethical matters only to those who had previously risen to the top of their profession by being elected by representatives of their peers to serve as president of their national association. I am sure there are other approaches that could have been taken, but they could do worse.

Robert F. Sharpe Jr.
Robert F. Sharpe & Company
Memphis