The United Way of the National Capital Area has announced that it will increase the amount it withholds from donations to help cover its overhead expenses, the Washington Post reports.

The organization has held its fee to 10 percent of donations for the last several years, in accordance with recommendations made after a financial scandal involving its former chief executive broke in 2002. In response to the scandal, the organization brought in new management, cut its workforce, and streamlined its operations, reducing its budget from $8 million in 2002 to $4.8 million this year. But it raised only $38 million last year from corporate and federal employees — about half as much as it did before the scandal. As a result, the organization has decided to raise fees on federal and corporate employees' donations to 11 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively, bringing those fees closer to the average, 12.7 percent, for United Ways across the country.

Gary Perlin, chairman of the organization's finance committee, said the 10 percent fee was never intended to be permanent and that, since 2003, the organization had been subsidizing its operating expenses with more than $5 million from its reserves. "We just cannot afford to assume we can subsidize operating costs out of reserves indefinitely," Perlin added.

Some nonprofit leaders who receive United Way funding said they supported the fee increase. "They've...got to increase their staffing in order to support the fundraising arm," said Mary Agee, who heads the United Way Nonprofit Advisory Council, a twenty-two-member liaison group to the United Way.

"There [are] always overhead costs with nonprofits," added Lynn Brantley, chief executive of the Capital Area Food Bank. "It's always hard to see and realize that they go up. But in today's world, that is a reality."