Yesterday, I linked to a study by The Salt Lake Tribune that found 89 NBA player charities “reported revenue of at least $31 million between 2005 and 2007, but only about 44 cents of every dollar raised – or $14 million of that $31 million – actually reached needy causes.”
Paul Caron at Tax Prof Blog (Via Sports Law Blog) broke down a few of the findings and highlights Carmelo Anthony, Allen Iverson, LeBron James, Steve Nash, and Shaquille O’Neal’s Form 990’s (Return of Organization Exempt From Income Tax).
Click here to read Caron’s blog.
Kelly Dwyer of Yahoo! Sports offers a balanced perspective:
The average NBA player — including lower rung-to-middle class rotation guys who don’t have the necessary funds to start up a charitable organization of their own — still spend more time performing NBA-mandated charitable tasks in a season than most of us will perform in a year. In ten years. Combined.
Nearly one-quarter of all NBA players have their own charity organization on top of the time the NBA Cares program demands they spend working on charitable acts, a number that cannot be touched by the NFL or MLB, to say nothing of the general public above a certain income bracket.
And topping it all off is the fact that these players are not businessmen, they’re NBA players; and in spite of the stated fact that we continually hear from them about this being a business, this isn’t the same as some corporate type passing the responsibility of a charitable drive to some paid lackey within his own business operation. This is an NBA player taking on a role that he is usually unqualified for, out of the goodness of his own heart.
But that isn’t to say that NBA players, by and large, can’t get their act together and get this stuff right. It starts with these very public drives, charity events with paid entertainers and all sorts of goodies that help to draw other entertainers and NBA players to devote their time to the event during their summer vacations.
