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lukeprog comments on Reply to Holden on The Singularity Institute - Less Wrong
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Regarding the theft:
I was telling my friend (who recently got into HPMOR and lurks a little on LW) about Holden's critique, specifically with regard to the theft. He's an accounting and finance major, and was a bit taken aback. His immediate response was to ask if SI had an outside accountant audit their statements. We searched around and it doesn't look like to us that you do. He immediately said that he would never donate to an organization that did not have an accountant audit their statements, and knowing how much I follow LW, immediately advised me to not to either. This seems like a really good step for addressing the transparency issues here, and now that he mentions it, seems a very prudent and obvious thing for any nonprofit to do.
Edit 2: Luke asked me to clarify, I am not necessarily endorsing not donating to SI because of this, unless this problem is a concern of yours. My intent was only to suggest ways SI can improve and may be turning away potential donors.
Edit: He just mentioned to me that the big four accounting firms often do pro bono work because it can be a tax write-off. This may be worth investigating.
Yes, we're currently in the process of hiring a bookkeeper (interviewed one, scheduling interviews with 2 others), which will allow us to get our books in enough order that an accountant will audit our statements. We do have an outside accountant prepare our 990s already. Anyway, this all requires donations. We can't get our books cleaned up and audited unless we have the money to do so.
Also, it's my impression that many or most charities our size and smaller don't have their books audited by an accountant because it's expensive to do so. It's largely the kind of thing a charity does when they have a bigger budget than we currently do. But I'd be curious to see if there are statistics on this somewhere; I could be wrong.
And yes, we are investigating the possibility of getting pro bono work from an accounting firm; it's somewhere around #27 on my "urgent to-do list." :)
Edit: BTW, anyone seriously concerned about this matter is welcome to earmark their donations for "CPA audit" so that those donations are only used for (1) paying a bookkeeper to clean up our processes enough so that an accountant will sign off on them, and (2) paying for a CPA audit of our books. I will personally make sure those earmarks are honored.
How many possible universes could here be (what % of the universes), where not donating to a charity that does not do accounting right when pulling in 500 grand a year, would result in destruction of mankind? 500 grand a year is not so little when you can get away with it. My GF's family owns a company smaller than that (in the US) and it has books in order.
Yeah, that would be really unfair, wouldn't it? And so it's hard to believe it could be true. And so it must not be.
(I actually don't believe it is likely to be true. But the fact it sounds silly and unfairly out-of-proportion is one of the worst possible arguments against it.)