Paul Light on the shifting tides of nonprofit governance
The Nonprofit Quarterly recently interviewed Paul Light regarding reform of board governance. Here is the beginning and a link to the complete interview:
Nonprofit Quarterly: You’ve written about “tides of reform,” or philosophies of reform regarding nonprofit board governance. How would you characterize those competing philosophies, and where, if pursued to their logical ends, would they take us in the debate on accountability and board governance?
Paul Light: The notion of tides of reform is that there can be general agreement about the need for reform but very deep differences about what to do. The tides are clearly coming in on governance reform.
The Internal Revenue Service comes out of the scientific management movement and sees this as a compliance issue with a strict set of rules and has an inflexible “We know best attitude.” The IRS might not be able to govern itself particularly well, but it loves to govern others. So it’s getting into the nonprofit management business, which is way outside its skill set.
For those who are interested, the IRS has been on the Government Accountability Office’s short list of troubled programs and agencies for more than a decade. Its tax administration systems were put on the list in 1990 even before the list formally existed and its internal modernization effort was listed in 1995. Let’s get those issues resolved before the IRS goes any further with its standards movement.
