The Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, in a full court opinion, has affirmed the denial of sales tax exemption for a nonprofit senior living community previously decided by a three-judge panel of the Court. (See Nonprofit Issues® Vol. XXXI, No. 2). The Court has agreed that Friends Boarding Home in West Chester failed to meet the criteria for exemption as a “purely public charity” originally set out by the state Supreme Court in 1987.
In 1850 noted Harvard University professor Louis Agassiz arranged to have four daguerreotypes made of Renty Taylor and Delia Taylor, who were enslaved on a plantation in South Carolina. Renty was ordered to disrobe. His daughter was striped to the waist. Their images were used by Agassiz in an academic publication and various lectures “to support polygenism, a pseudoscientific racist theory for which Aggasiz, a prominent scientist, was a vocal proponent,” according to the highest court of Massachusetts.
A federal District Court in Texas has upheld an IRS denial of a $1.257 million charitable contribution deduction claim for a gift to a donor advised fund because, it said, the contemporary written acknowledgment of the gift did not say the money was held under the “exclusive legal control” of the recipient charity. The Court said that the Contemporaneous Written Acknowledgment could not be combined with the gift agreement, which provided for ultimate authority and control of the assets, to meet the requirements of the Treasury regulations.
When People’s United Bank in New York City closed the accounts of a Black Muslim Senegalese-American woman and a “Muslim nonprofit” she controlled, she sued the bank for alleged discrimination on the basis of race, religion and national origin.
Should the federal criminal sentencing guideline be used to add an extra eight to ten months in prison for the executive director of a charity who embezzled about $150,000 from the agency when the guideline says a two-level enhancement should be applied when the offence involves “a misrepresentation that the defendant was acting on behalf of a charitable” organization?
A federal District Court in Illinois said it should be applied. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has said not so fast.
When the finance officer of the Catholic Diocese of Jackson, MS, who had been appointed for a five-year term under the Code of Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church, was fired by the bishop in 2018 and was unsuccessful in pursuing internal appeals, he sued not only for wrongful termination, but also for defamation and negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
