RESEARCH

Fremont-Smith Leads Nonprofit Probe

Last fall, in a move that surprised few people involved in nonprofit law and regulation, Marion Fremont-Smith, a senior researcher at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, was appointed co-convener of a group of expert advisors who will assist the Independent Sector’s (an organization representing the nonprofit field) new nonprofit reform panel. Her testimony last summer before the Senate Finance Committee’s hearing on regulatory reforms governing the nonprofit sector led to her recent appointment as co-convener of an eight-member Expert Advisory Group that will be assisting the Independent Sector’s Panel on the Nonprofit Sector. The group will explore the committee’s recommendations, which include amending the code to extend existing limitations and increase disclosure requirements, expanding the role of the IRS to police the internal practices of exempt organizations, and increasing enforcement at the federal and state government level.

In an interview last fall in Philanthropy magazine, Fremont-Smith noted that the worst abuses in the nonprofit sector have been the “payment of excessive compensation and the provision of benefits or perquisites to insiders.”

During the last several decades, Fremont-Smith has become a leader in the field — first, as assistant attorney general and division director in the Division of Public charities in the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, later at the Russell Sage Foundation, and finally, at the Boston law firm Choate, Hall & Stewart, where in 1971 she became a partner specializing in nonprofits.

Along the way, she has published widely on the topic of nonprofit regulation, including two seminal books: Foundations and Government: State and Federal Law and Supervision in 1965 and Governing Nonprofit Organizations: Federal and State Law and Regulations last May.