Feb 16 2010

A Library Begins With a Single Book

And a twenty-first century document collection begins with a single PDF.

Here’s the federal income tax return from the Humane Society of the United States for the year 2008.

Even though 2009 is over, HSUS has until the end of May to file its taxes for last year, and it's customary to request an "automatic" 3-month extension. So this is the most recent return available.

HSUS itself has published a version of this document on its website. I trust it’s an official copy.

Some highlights:

  1. HSUS has 555 employees, and paid them $37.8 million in 2008. That includes over $2.5 million contributed to employee pension plans. HSUS chief executive Wayne Pacelle made just over $251,000 in salary and benefits.
  2. HSUS paid out $4.7 million in grants to other organizations and individuals. That represents a 23 percent drop from 2007; about half of this money went to Californians for Humane Farms, which was the political committee behind the “Proposition 2” ballot campaign.
  3. Although HSUS’s overall income was down by $16 million, this is entirely due to poor performance of its investments. (HSUS earned $11.8 million in investment profits in 2007, but lost over $7 million in 2008.)
  4. HSUS raised $86.7 million from the public in 2008, spent $99.7 million (an $8 million increase over 2007), and ended the year with $162.2 million in assets. That’s a sweet bottom line, don’t you think?

Here’s the odd part. That $4.7 million in grants in (2) above? Only about $450,000 of it consists of checks that HSUS wrote to organizations doing hands-on sheltering of dogs and cats. I checked, line by line. I’m going to post my accounting of this soon, so anyone can correct my math or quibble with my estimation of what counts as a hands-on pet shelter.

Over at CCF, we detailed some of this at the end of December. HSUS also paid “Arizona Lockbox and Fulfillment, Inc.” over $4.2 million in 2008. That’s more than 4 cents of every dollar it spent. What does this company do? It counts HSUS’s donations.

And I’m sure it’s a fine, fine company. But don’t you think it’s a little creepy that its initials are A-L-F?

In addition to this document, I’m supplementing The HumaneWatch library with HSUS tax returns going back to 1995. Do your filing cabinets contain any earlier HSUS tax documents than these? You know where to send them.

Related Documents

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Posted on 02/16/2010 at 07:15 AM by the HumaneWatch Team
The Best of HumaneWatch • Document Analysis • (5) Comments

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Comments

This is meaningless without a comparison to similar nonprofit organizations. Am I supposed to be outraged that Wayne Pacelle makes $250K a year? I could be wrong, but I don’t think that’s at all unusual for the head of a large national charity.  Certainly the CEO of a similarly-sized for-profit company would make many times that.

And why are you so offended that the HSUS’s investments lost money in 2008? Are you also offended at every single college and charitable foundation whose endowments lost money? I don’t get it.

$38M/555 employees is an average annual salary of $70K. That’s only a well-paying job if you’re under 30 and have no family obligations and no mortgage. All of the employees could probably earn more at a for-profit company. I am not outraged that they received ~$5,000 each in retirement benefits.

Posted by cljack on 02/16 at 12:09 PM

See http://is.gd/8xhjj for the Charity Navigator 2009 CEO Compensation study. Mr. Pacelle’s salary is about 43 percent higher than the average for a charity CEO in Washington, DC.

I’m not offended that HSUS lost money in the market, as much as I’m stunned that they would run deficits in a down market. But that’s a point I should have made more clearly.

And as far as employee salaries go, I think the larger issue why HSUS needs that many people in the first place—not what they’re paid.

Posted by David on 02/16 at 05:31 PM

“the larger issue why HSUS needs that many people in the first place”.... 555 employees, 50 states, thats 11.1 employees per state.  That doesn’t seem exorbitant to me? 

So, has anyone asked HSUS to show what they do with the rest of their money each year?  Just curious.  Does the HSUS have operating expenditures of their own that benefit animals directly or indirectly?

Posted by Stephanie on 04/04 at 04:09 PM

<blockquote>“555 employees, 50 states, thats 11.1 employees per state.”<blockquote>
Well, it’s up to nearly 800 as of this month. And reportedly, nearly 650 of them are clustered up in Gaithersburg, Maryland in a sprawling office complex.  Not exactly what you’d envisioned.

Posted by David on 04/04 at 04:39 PM

Personally I am gald that I found this article for many reasons.  Among the top of that list is my personal feelings towards the HSUS due to my active involvement in the beef industry.  Also I am currently writing a paper for one of my college classes exposing the HSUS to the public and to my class for the reason that many people (especially outside of agriculture) do not realize what is really happening with this organization.  The fact of the extremely high salaries, along with the outrageous number of employees in one place, is shocking to me. Also I already knew that they didn’t give very much to shelters but I had no idea it was so little…

Posted by JC on 04/11 at 11:11 PM

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