Tracy Press-Scrutiny increases with nonprofits' public contracts

Tracy Press: "Scrutiny increases with nonprofits' public contracts

Enrique Gutierrez/Tracy Press
Ben van der Meer
Tracy Press
Published May 17, 2005, in the Tracy Press.
They're not supposed to make money. Their mission statements are often noble, and the people who donate their time to them can have the best of intentions.
But as nonprofit groups get a bigger share of public dollars � through both grants and cooperative programs � oversight of how they spend that money is coming under increasing scrutiny.
�It is true that the government is relying pretty significantly on the nonprofit sector,� said Mike Cortes, director of the Institute for Nonprofit Organization Management at the University of San Francisco . �In most cases, the record of where the money is spent is in government agency files. And in government agency files, there is the potential there for a less-than-detailed breakdown.� "