Interesting Things Find The Way Onto The Internet....

The winding way of blogging....

I read on Consumer Law & Policy about a site called Guidestar and an interesting form called the 990.

The 990 has the top 5 highest paid employees and contractors of every non-profit filing taxes in the US.

After a way too long wait for an automated (but free) account confirmation email, I go in and find the following factoids...

• The highest paid employee of PETA is Debra Durham. She is a Primate Specialist and made $70,982 in salary last year. However, multiple law firms top the contractor list for PETA with the highest being Zuckerman, Spaeder at $670,353. I was picking on PETA because they show up in another blog I read, Feministing, all the time.
• The highest paid employee of my undergraduate university made $1,037,431 --- and appears to be the lead of the endowment investing group (Dean Takahashi, Sr. Director Invest.) However, one clinical professor (David Leffell) made over $1.1 million, and evidently working in the Lab for Medicine Pediatrics pays really well as Earl Glusac and Jennifer McNiff each made over $725,000 in salary. Must be nice.
• My high school, meanwhile, paid the Director of Technology $100,717 (which is more than any teacher, but less than the Dean who shows up on the Board salaries.) Rounding out the top five for my high school are some folks whose salary is below my pay range. Which actually feels kind of good.

My only disappointments are that a)I can't think of any other charity or non-profits I really want to see this for and that b)the whole thing is a bunch of scans. I can only begin to imagine all the interesting things that could be done if this stuff was in a big database... Things like, "this charity pays its board 6x the national average" or "these 3,432 charities have no employees earning over $50k" (the threshold for reporting, and that would be a lot of charities.. market rate for non-profit salaries is generally through the floor.)