Clarification in ED cost

The following question was asked of me by the Deposition Reporters Association from California, and I have new information regarding the cost to members of the Executive Director of NCRA. I am only including question and answer 4, because DRA is planning on publishing this in their newsletter in July. I will publish the entire thing here when it comes out. I am posting this on this blog site on June 11.

4. Do you think $30,000 a month is an appropriate salary for the executive director?

Let me first explain that when I posted on my blog site that we pay the ED $360,000 a year, that was salary and benefits. I did not use the word “salary” and should have been more careful in my wording. However, let me explain that I have been working with a group of people in the election campaign who are very interested in the money that is spent on the ED position, as well as other positions at NCRA. I have the IRS Form 990 for the year 2007. All non-profit organizations have to file these. And one of the items is the ED’s pay. For the year 2007, the form listed the ED’s compensation at $313,782 and his benefits at $48,969. Adding those together, it comes to $362,751. That is where I came up with the $360,000 figure.

Now, the people I have been working with have been trying to get those numbers for quite some time directly from NCRA and could never get them. So they went to a service that deals in obtaining this information and we got the numbers submitted to the IRS through this service. You do not even need to be a member of a non-profit organization to be able to obtain this Form 990 IRS tax data. Understand that 2007 is the latest Form 990 that we have. The one for 2008 will come out after this year’s convention. So this is the latest information we have. I have now been told that due to some sort of overlap, the information on the 2007 990 is for more than one year.

I have been told directly by the ED himself that his salary is $273,858, and I certainly believe him. So that would come out to about $22,821 per month.

I have also been informed that sometime next week, which will be the week of June 14th, NCRA will send out a notice to all members explaining what the ED’s salary and benefits are.

Having said all that, there are two things to keep in mind as far as I’m concerned. One is that over the period of time the current ED has been employed at NCRA, the membership numbers have been dropping. When I left the board as immediate past president in 1996, I believe we were at right about 33,000 members. We now have approximately 20,000. You can do the math. That includes all membership categories. I am not trying to say this was the ED’s fault. I’m just saying those are the numbers.

The other thing is this whole concept of confidentiality. Why would what we pay a staff member be a secret from the membership? If I pay someone to come and clean my house, I guess I should know what I’m paying them. If I’m going to hire a lawyer, I guess I should know what I’m going to have to pay the lawyer. It’s my money. They will be working for me. I have every right to know.

When there was a teleconference I believe in January of this year with all the people who had been nominated for a board position and were going to be interviewed by the Nominating Committee, the ED was explaining about a confidentiality form you have to sign if you become a member of the board. Actually, they asked you to sign even before you become a member of the board. They wanted it signed before you were interviewed by the Nominating Committee. And he said that this confidentiality thing was somewhat unique to NCRA. Well, I refused to sign the form and said that if I do get elected, I’ll have a discussion with the board first to try to do away with the requirement before I would ever sign it. So the fact that the information relating to the total compensation we pay the ED is going to be released to the entire membership of NCRA, I think is a real plus and consider it a win for those people who really like to know what’s going on. I think we have been able to kind of kill two birds with one stone as far as gathering information and dealing with the confidentiality issue.

Now, I guess you can draw this conclusion for yourselves, but while the group I’m working with was trying to get this information directly from NCRA, did the board not know they were trying to get this information? More importantly, did the secretary-treasurer not know these members were trying to get this information? If he didn’t, then there’s some communication problems between staff and the board. If he did, why was the information not turned over? The members have a right to know.