More than a dozen years after it published a series of stories about financial abuses at private foundations and the failure of regulators to address the problem, the Boston Globe has stumbled on a small family trust based in New Hampshire that pays members of the donor's immediate family six-figure salaries while awarding only a handful of grants annually.

Based on a tip from a reader, the Globe examined the tax filings of the James G. Martin Memorial Trust in Rye Beach, New Hampshire, and found that since at least 1998, the daughters of Gerard M. Martin, a former nursing home executive who created the trust, have been listed as employees who devote forty hours a week to the trust and are each paid up to $115,000 annually. One of the daughters, however, is also listed as "proprietor" and "managing partner/funeral director" of a funeral home, raising questions about how she is able to work full-time for the trust while running a business.

The Globe also found that the trust makes donations to about a dozen organizations a year — and in one year only gave to five — with the largest donations often awarded to the alma maters of family members, including Newton Country Day School of the Sacred Heart and Boston College. Indeed, Martin's three daughters have been paid more in some years than the trust paid out, including 2013, when they collectively pulled down $347,000 in salary and benefits, while the foundation awarded $230,000 to seven organizations. "Bottom line," the Globe's tipster wrote in an e-mail, "a man pays his daughters $350,000 year to write checks to the same 6-10 nonprofits every year" and is eligible for a charitable tax break on what he pays them.

According to Bruce R. Hopkins, a Kansas City lawyer and author of Private Foundations: Tax Law and Compliance, that's not all that unusual in the foundation world. "This kind of thing is relatively common, unfortunately, where children or friends or even the founders themselves are employees, and they're paid a fairly high salary for doing jobs that really don't require that much effort or time," Hopkins told the Globe. "When you aggregate all these instances, it could be a big revenue loss for the states and federal government, and a big abuse that people are taking a charitable deduction for these donations."

Neither Gerard Martin nor his daughters responded to the Globe's requests for comment, and the accountant who prepares the foundation's tax filings said he didn't have a phone number for the Martins because "I never talk to them" and "everything is done by mail."

Pablo Eisenberg, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership, told the Globe that little had changed since the paper published its eye-opening series on charitable sector abuses in 2003. The trust "may not be the most egregious example" of financial misconduct in the sector, "but it's a pattern where small foundations and their families take advantage of lax oversight," Eisenberg said, noting that IRS staff cuts have severely compromised the agency's ability to monitor charities in the U.S. Indeed, thanks to budget cuts at the federal and state levels and job layoffs at newspapers around the country, "oversight of the nonprofit sector, including foundations, is so minimal these days that it almost amounts to nothing."