SCOUTING SALARIES: Utah Boy Scouts execs earn high pay

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Jan/Feb 2008 by Davidson, Lee

The Boy Scout law teaches that Scouts are thrifty. Indeed, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) stretches its dollars by using millions of unpaid volunteers who sacrifice money, time and even their precious vacation weeks to staff Scout camps.

But we found that scores of professional, fulltime Boy Scout executives make six-figure salaries or more-up to $1 million in compensation a year for the top executives nationally. And they are paid far more than officers at other youth-serving nonprofit groups across the country.

At the same time, Scout councils in Utah use some strong-armed tactics, generally not duplicated elsewhere, to raise funds that help pay those salaries.

Here, Scout executives assign congregations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which uses scouting as its activity arm for young males, to visit all homes within their boundaries to solicit funds for Scout councils. Quotas are often set, and if congregations fail to meet them, their Scouts may not receive the discounts for camps and supplies that others enjoy. Local church leaders are sometimes sent to re-solicit money if not enough was initially raised.

When the story based on our investigation of BSA salaries was published in November 2007, it hit a nerve. Hundreds of readers posted online responses on our Web page. A look at how the story was researched may help others interested in evaluating major tax-exempt nonprofit groups in their own area.

Inspired by a 990

The story started when I was teaching a class at a local university. I was showing students some useful Web sites for research, and introduced them to GuideStar.org. After registering for free, users can view IRS Form 990 for myriad nonprofit groups nationwide. To demonstrate, I asked students for some favorite nonprofits, and we pulled up their 990s. One student suggested the local council of the Boy Scouts. My jaw dropped when I saw that the top executive there made more than $200,000 a year (the median income in Utah is $37,700). My jaw dropped further when we pulled up the 990 for the national council and saw its top executive made nearly $1 million a year.

I decided to pursue that further and to compare pay for Utah Scout execs to other councils nationally and to other groups serving youth. I ended up looking at 990s for about 300 local Scout councils, and for dozens of other youth groups around the nation. I extracted information from 990s and entered it into spreadsheets I designed myself.

In your own investigation, the first step is to figure out how to find the Form 990s for the groups you seek. Using GuideStar is likely the easiest way, especially when investigating groups scattered nationwide, but you can also request to see the forms at a nonprofit's office.

At GuideStar.org, the "advanced search" option offers more refined results. For example, if you use the site's main-page search engine and type in "Boy Scouts," GuideStar will find 1,347 different groups with that name nationally-and will display information for only 500 of them. The advanced search allows narrowing by state or even a city, and by keywords or names of a group. One state at a time, I looked for the keywords "Boy Scout" and "council" and arranged results alphabetically. I found Form 990s for 293 of the 304 Scout councils nationwide. (When I started the project, I did not have a list of all councils. I obtained that later. GuideStar did not have 990s for some smaller councils.)

I found that the most current 990s available for most Scout councils were for 2005. The filings are often a couple of years out of date, in part because groups can seek automatic filing extensions. Also, many nonprofits use tax years that are different than calendar years, which may extend their filing deadline. Plus, it takes time for GuideStar to obtain forms and put them online.

Next, you need to figure out what information from the 990s is needed for a project. I made two extensive main spreadsheets. One was to help figure out each nonprofit's overall budget, and what percentage of expenses went for such things as fundraising, services and payroll. Here are what I found to be some key lines from the Form 990 for such a spreadsheet:

Line 1d: Total contributions, gifts and grants

Line 12: Total revenue

Line 13: Expenses for services

Line 14: Expenses for management

Line 15: Expenses for fundraising

Line 17: Total expenses

Adding lines 25-29: Provides total payroll expenses

Charting salaries

I made a second spreadsheet tracking the names of top executives, their salaries and the names and salaries of other highly paid officials. I found that information about who is paid the most can be listed in different places by different nonprofits. One of the key hiding places on the form is "Part V-A Current Officers, Directors, Trustees and Key Employees," generally on page 5 of the 2005 form. Another place is "Part V-B," where payments made to former officers who departed during the year are reported. Finally, and often most important, is Part 1 of Schedule A for "Compensation of Five Highest Paid Employees," where most of the top executives' compensations are listed. A box at the bottom of Part 1 asks for "total number of other employees paid more than $50,000." Tracking numbers reported there helped me show that Scout councils in Utah had far more employees than the national average who make more than $50,000.