State Regulation and Enforcement in the Charitable Sector, Cindy Lott, et. al., Urban Institute, 2016 (Reference)

This 2016 report is the first comprehensive fifty state empirical study of state regulation of the nonprofit sector.  The principal author, Cindy Lott, is a former Assistant Attorney General in Indiana and has been working in the nonprofit field at Columbia University since 2004.

E X E C U T I V E   S U M M A R Y

This study is the first systematic analysis of state-level oversight and regulation of charities in the United States. The analysis has three components: a legal analysis of laws pertaining to charities in 56 US jurisdictions; a survey of all state and territory offices with oversight, regulatory,and enforcement authority over charities; and interviews with officials in over two-thirds of those offices.

Major findings includethe following:

No single state law of charities oversight exists; instead, oversight involves a complex mix of substantive areas,including charitable trust law, governance, criminal law, solicitation and registration requirements and compliance, corporate transaction review,and conservation easements.

Organization and staffing of state charity offices vary greatly across the country; in 41 percent of states,one office has primary responsibility, but in 59 percent of states,responsibility is shared with other agencies or offices.

Within an attorney general’s office, 13 jurisdictions have a charities bureau, and14 jurisdictions house charities oversight within the consumer protection division of the office.

Most registration oversight is lodged in state attorneys’general offices (21states), followed by secretary of state offices (15) and other state-level charity offices, typically, consumer affairs or business/financial regulation (8).

Lawyers and non-legal staff who oversee charities number approximately 355 in the 48 reporting jurisdictions.

Thirty-one percent of jurisdictions have less than one full-time-equivalent staff, 51 percent have between one and 9.9 full-time-equivalent staff, and 19 percent have 10 or more full-time-equivalent staff.