According to a survey conducted by the Listening Post Project, a nonprofit collaborative whose goal is to assess how the nation's nonprofits are responding to economic and policy changes, 95 percent of respondents said they regularly distributed financial statements to their boards of directors, while 97 percent said they had undergone an audit within the past two years.

The survey, which was distributed to more than six hundred nonprofit organizations, also found that the vast majority of respondents (81 percent) said that, consistent with Sarbanes-Oxley guidelines for private companies, their CEO or board chair signed off on the information they were required to file with the Internal Revenue Service; that a majority (53 percent) reported adding or strengthening internal management controls as a result of outside audits; and that the nonprofit organizations surveyed were considerably less likely than for-profit firms to delay their required filings with the IRS.

"What this shows is that the nonprofit sector is already adhering to many of the financial disclosure practices that have been the subject of recent Senate Finance Committee hearings," said Lester Salamon, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, which oversees the Listening Post Project.

"This survey provides the first solid empirical picture of the financial disclosure practices of nonprofit organizations and demonstrates why it may be unwise to base legislation on a handful of anecdotes that fail to capture the true picture of nonprofit operations," added Peter Goldberg, CEO of the Milwaukee-based Alliance for Children and Families, a partner in the project, which receives financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Surdna Foundation.

To view preliminary results of the survey (4 pages, PDF), visit: http://www.jhu.edu/listeningpost/news/pdf/comm04.pdf.