Customer Reviews

The Law of Tax-Exempt Organizations

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The nonprofit sector is a huge part of the American economy. Nonprofits range from multinationals to your local little league. While, technically, the same body of tax laws applies to all of them, the level of sophistication varies as dramatically as the size of the nonprofit. And while the big nonprofits can afford to buy expertise, smaller nonprofits have to manage more of the tasks themselves. This book can help.

Hopkins' book is an excellent reference for attorneys and accounts and nonprofit executives with some knowledge of nonprofit tax laws work. It's not likely to be useful to and it's not written for the average volunteer. This is a fairly technical resource, and while nonprofit tax law gets a lot more complicated than Hopkins, this is a very good middle-level resource.

If I have any criticism of Hopkins it's this: in recent editions he has removed important subjects from this reference and spun them off into separate books at equally high prices. Most of the treatment of charitable donations, for example, is now in a different book. Private foundations are now in a different book. Excess benefits transactions are in a different book. You can spend a ton of money on Professor Hopkins. It costs him one star in my rating.

Even so, as a basic entry point, this book is indispensable. I've attended seminars by Prof. Hopkins and read most his books, and he is very knowledgeable and does a good job at the difficult task of translating IRS-speak into comprehensible language. This book should be a part of every nonprofit lawyer and accountant's library.

In mid-1999 I read this treatise in conjunction with the author's one day course on the Law of Tax Exempt Organizations. The book is essentially a "hornbook:" a summary of law geared towards lawyers and accountants, rather than the casual reader. It would be especially helpful for lawyers and accountants in outside firms who counsel a variety of different tax exempt organizations and are confronted with questions of how to structure an organization or several related organizations. The material is valuable but no easy slogging, so if you can take the course (which in mid-1999 was approx. $230 and included the book), it would be worth the extra $70 or so.

I've submitted a suggested update to the catalog, but I'm adding this review just to make sure buyers are aware of what they're getting: the $80 "paperback version" of this book is the cumulative supplement, not a paperback version of the hornbook itself. It provides updated information on how the law has changed since the ninth edition of the hornbook was published but does not reproduce the contents of the hardbound version.

It is not an instructional book you understand and apply it easily. it is for more text book which have been thought in universities.

Breadth over depth: broadly covers most subjects that you may encounter in your counsel to nonprofs, serving as a good starting point for further research. I referenced it regularly as general counsel to a nonprof board.

US nonprofit boards, officers, senior managers, and funddevelopment professionals have enough to contend with without alsoracing to keep pace with the accelerating changes in the multi-faceted law of tax-exempt organizations.

As with his prior editions, Hopkins has managed to address, within the covers of a single volume well, actually, he added another book to more fully cover private foundations!

This is definitely a must-have book for anyone working for or with US nonprofit organizations, such as board members, officers, senior staff, fund development staff or fund-raising consultants, grantwriters, attorneys and accountants advising tax-exempt organizations, and anyone else requiring a single-volume treatise covering the law of tax-exempt organizations.