Welcome to your daily briefing on nonprofit developments in Michigan. Today we're covering 5 key stories including updates on michigan nonprofit headlines, background & context. Let's dive in.
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The Michigan Attorney General's office provides an online search portal for looking up charities, public safety organizations, and professional fundraisers.
Nonprofit professionals in MI can use this tool to research potential partners, verify registration status, and conduct due diligence before engaging with charitable entities or fundraisers.
MI Funding Hub is a centralized resource where Michigan communities can explore grants and funding opportunities, access technical assistance, and find tools to support their work.
Nonprofit professionals across Michigan gain a single destination to discover relevant funding and get hands-on support that can strengthen their grant applications and organizational capacity.
Reach professionals in this market
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Form 990 is required to be made public by the filing organization on request and is indexed by ProPublica and others within weeks of filing. Sections most boards underestimate: Schedule J (top-staff compensation), Schedule L (transactions with interested persons), and Schedule O (narrative explanations that "soften" other answers). Donors and reporters read these.
Items that read fine in management's narrative often read very differently in print. Pre-filing review by a non-finance board member catches optics issues that a CFO will not.
Private inurement is benefit flowing to insiders (officers, directors, key employees); it is an absolute prohibition. Private benefit is benefit to outsiders that is more than incidental to the exempt purpose; it is a question of degree. Both can revoke exemption, but the legal analysis differs.
Insider transactions trigger automatic intermediate sanctions even when the exemption survives. Outsider benefit triggers a facts-and-circumstances analysis. Distinguishing them shapes the defense.
The streamlined Form 1023-EZ is available only to organizations meeting specific limits on projected revenue, assets, and activity types. Filing 1023-EZ when ineligible produces a determination that is technically valid but vulnerable to retroactive revocation if discovered. The full 1023 is harder to file but harder to challenge.
Loss of exemption is retroactive to the original determination, exposing the organization to back-tax liability. The eligibility checklist is the only protection.
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