New clients often start their relationship with our law firm by using our fixed-fee compliance review to identify potential problem areas lurking in their files. We call this our Avoiding Disaster™ Review.
During this review we review a wide range of your corporate documents, searching for legal impediments, internal inconsistencies, noncompliance with nonprofit statutes and regulations, and other red flags. We then detail our findings and suggest steps to correct problems.
All of this work is conducted under our attorney/client privilege and treated in strictest confidence. Among the issues we explore are whether your current activities are substantially related to your original exempt purpose (affecting your unrelated business tax exposure and nonprofit postal eligibility); and whether your tax returns are properly prepared or if they will pose problems when you have to show them to sophisticated contributors or opponents.
We will ask whether your Board and others may have personal liability under the excess benefit laws, and whether your direct mail is eligible for nonprofit rates under the “content restriction” regulations and if it contains all the disclaimers necessary under the federal tax and state charitable solicitation laws.
Once our review is complete, you then are ready to take remedial action, either internally or talking with us about follow-up legal services. If you are interested in an Avoiding Disaster™ Review, please contact us for further information.