Q&A: Budget assignment for PA5003

Q: I am attaching the link of the Hennepin County budget for 2006-2007 and wanted to know if this is correct.

A: The link is great but you may click around the some website to get more information.

• Here is the complete budget of FY2007: I would encourage you to quickly read through the document and get a sense of how the information is organized. The rest of this course is focused on "Financial Reports" which are compiled after a fiscal year ends; the purpose of this assignment is for students to read the "Budget" which is proposed before a fiscal year starts.
  
• The link that you provided sets an example about how you may organize information about major revenue sources or expenditure types. Note that you are expected to calculate the percentages (with formula and absolute referencing) by yourself in the Excel table even if you know the percentages already.
  

PA5003 Syllabus

Click here to download syllabus for PA5003: Introduction to Financial Analysis and Management (in PDF).

* Students in the class are encouraged to get the DOC version through WebVista, which includes all functioning hyperlinks.

PA5113: State and Local Public Finance

Click here to download syllabus for PA5113: State and Local Public Finance (in PDF).

* Students in the class are encouraged to get the DOC version through WebVista, which includes all functioning hyperlinks.

Learning from student feedbacks

I just read student feedbacks from last semester's teaching evaluation for two sections of PA 5003. Grateful of the comments, I may try these things in the new semester (especially for the once-one-week section):

• Less coverage of topics, more thorough explanations;
• Less assignments, with more clear expectations;
• Further slow down and add more opportunities for questions;
• Add more in-class exercises and walk through things if necessary

Nonprofit financial disclosure requirements

• Disclosure requirements by IRS

Nonprofit organizations are formed by filing initial registration statements to related state authorities. However, in order to exempt federal income tax they need to obtain tax exempt status from the IRS and are subject to the requirements of annual tax filings.

Most public charities nonprofits, except religious organizations or those with less $25,000 in annual revenues, much file an annual IRS Form 990. Filing organizations with gross receipts of $100,000 or less and total assets less than $250,000 can file a simplified form, 990 EZ. If a nonprofit earns over $1,000 from activities that are unrelated to their tax-exempt mission, it must file a form IRS 990T and may need to pay an unrelated business income tax (UBIT). Private foundations are required to file Form 990-PF.

Nonprofits are required to making their IRS filings available to the public on a same-day basis and for only a reasonable copying charge, unless they make their 990s widely available on the Internet. This requirement has largely been fulfilled by the creation of Guidestar, where you can get access to scanned copies of 990s from most nonprofits.

• Disclosure requirements by state authorities

At the state level there is considerable variation in the level of oversight on nonprofit finances. Many states require audited financial statements (following GAAP) along with IRS 990 Forms for annual filing. Other states require only Form 990, either Form 990 or audited financial statements, or no requirements at all. In 1997, the National Association of State Charities Officials and the National Association of Attorneys General developed a Unified Registration Statement (URS) to standardize, simplify, and economize compliance under the related state laws. Today, 32 states and the District of Columbia are allowed to file the unique state forms or the URS. In comparison, Minnesota has a more comprehensive nonprofit disclosure system than many other states. It has also created a searchable web-database that permit users to obtain state filing information on Minnesota nonprofits [?].

• Disclosure requirements by other parties

In addition, federal grant-making agencies or institutional donors may require that nonprofits provide supplemental disclosures. For example, since 1990, nonprofits receiving substantial direct or indirect federal assistance are subject to even more stringent auditing requirements than GAAP, governed by an Office of Management and Budget Circular A-133.

A lecture outline for nonprofit financial management

This is a tentative outline for my PA 5920 Skill Workshop: Financial Management of Nonprofit Organizations. You can click on the links to get additional references for related topics. Comments and questions are welcome!

1. What are nonprofit organizations?
• What is in a name?
• Basics of nonprofit management
• Formation, structure, and tax exempt status
• National taxonomy of exempt entities (details)
  
• Key fiscal issues for nonprofits
• Nonprofit accountability
• Nonprofit and government
• Nonprofit in fiscal stress
  
2. Nonprofit finance and budgeting
   
• Revenue sources
• Service fees: from individuals or organizations
  
• Grant-writing: from governments or foundations
  
• Fund-raising: sources and issues
  
• Functional expenses
  
• Program expenses
• Administrative expenses
• Fund-raising expenses
  
• Borrowing
• Types of nonprofit borrowing
• Nonprofit borrowing guide
• Nonprofit budgeting
• Budgeting process
• Budgeting techniques
3. Nonprofit financial reports
• Requirements of financial reporting
  
• IRS 990: where to get it? how to read it?
• Requirements at the state level
• Some special issues (Urban Institute)
  
• Financial accounting for nonprofits
  
• Financial conditions for nonprofits
  
• Financial condition analysis
  
• Assessing financial vulnerability of nonprofits
  
• Some caveats

*: Click here to download the PowerPoint file of the lecture in PDF.

On teaching -- Herbert A. Simon

Excerpts from Models of My Life, Herbert A. Simon:

"I learned that there is no use lecturing a class unless the class is listening. And they will only listen if you are saying something that they think they can understand and that seems relevant. They will listen better if you talk LOUDLY. If you pace up and down, you can tell from their moving heads whether they are following you (like the crowd at a tennis match). You can also get feedback by keeping your eye on the prettiest girl in the class to see whether she is attentive [One of the most interesting part to me:)]...

"Teaching is not entertainment, but it is unlikely to be successful unless it is entertaining (the more respectable word would be interesting).

"Coverage of subject matter is a snare and a delusion. You begin where the students are prepared to begin; and you carry them as far as you can without losing them. Whether that takes you to the end of the specified curriculum, half as far, or twice as far, is irrelevant. You talk from notes, and certainly do not read lectures -- in fact, it is better if you do not write them out. Anything you cannot communicate without reading will be forgotten instantly, and probably is not suitable for a lecture anyway.

"You prepare notes for more material than you can possibly cover so that you don't suffer from the beginning teacher's nightmare: What happens if I run out of material before the class ends? (If you do, which almost never happens, you dismiss the class. They will thank you for it.) There is zero correlation between the number of hours you put in preparing formally for your classes and their success, provided that you have a coherent general outline of the curriculum and a thorough knowledge of the subject.

"You start every class by giving students the opportunity (or better, the obligation) to ask questions about their readings, about previous sessions, or about anything. you take each question seriously, and answer it without making a jackass of the student who asked it (no matter how foolish the question)...

"Of course, students don't learn by being lectured at, anyway; they learn by thinking hard, solving problems, dissecting proofs. Requiring them to write briefs was the most important component of our teaching at IIT. After students have thought hard about a topic, a lecture can help them sort out and organize their thoughts. Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds. If students have thought about something, you can discuss it profitably in class; without the preparation, it is just a bull session.

"You keep lectures on the high ground. The details of proofs are better gleaned from books. Above all, you feel no obligation to repeat the contents of the textbook, for that would simply confirm student in the habit of not reading it.

"... Without exception, I believe, the real core of the complain [about a faculty member]
was that the instructor showed disdain for students, or a punitive attitude toward them, or cynicism about teaching. Students are prepared to tolerate any other form of incompetence in an instructor, but not hostility."