The Third Circuit Court of Appeals, claiming to be the first circuit to decide a question that has divided federal District Courts in recent years, has ruled that a church agency cannot establish a “church plan” for employee retirement purposes that is not covered by the terms of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (“ERISA”).
A taxpayer’s consent to give the IRS extra time to assess tax due while it considers the validity of a charitable contribution deduction does not prevent the Service from recalculating the total tax that should have been due in a suit by the taxpayer to claim a refund of taxes paid.
A limited liability company established to facilitate construction of improvements to a charitable community center is not a corporation entitled to real estate tax exemption, a trial court in Connecticut has held. It is not a corporation as required by state law and the court was not willing to consider it as the equivalent of a corporation.
An employee who was allegedly promised that she could return to her administrative position after helping her employer relocate a patient call center cannot claim detrimental reliance on the promise when she was terminated without being offered her old job back, a federal District Court in Massachusetts has ruled. The doctrine of detrimental reliance does not apply when the employment situation is an at-will position, it said.
A small nonprofit corporation that files a successful Freedom of Information Act case against the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense without using an outside lawyer is entitled to recover attorney’s fees, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has ruled.
A bank trustee that took a little more than two months to distribute trust funds to charities during the precipitous drop in stock prices in late 2008 is not liable for a breach of fiduciary duty under the circumstances of the case, an appellate court in California has affirmed. (Estate of Gilliland, Hi-Desert Memorial Hospital v. Union Bank of California, Ct. of App. CA, Second Dist., Div.
A federal District Court in Ohio has permitted a group of Tea Party and other conservative organizations to pursue a class action against the Internal Revenue Service for allegedly illegal scrutiny of their applications for tax exempt status.
Trustees of Girard College, a free elementary and secondary school for disadvantaged youth in Philadelphia, have been denied a request to eliminate their residential and high school programs temporarily in order to rebuild their reserves to assure the long-term viability of their programs. The Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court has affirmed an Orphans’ Court decision denying the request. (Estate of Stephen Girard, No. 2254 C.D. 2014, 1/21/16.)
