The Muscular Dystrophy Association’s 2023 Taxes: Executive Pay is Still Getting More of your Donations than Research.
The Muscular Dystrophy’s 2023 tax returns have now been posted on their site, and if you were hoping there would be a lot of changes with how they use your donations, well, I have bad news for you.
Let’s start on a positive note, though. MDA awarded $1,879,795 more in research grants than they did last in 2022. That’s great.
But just as I started to feel a little optimistic, I looked at “salaries, other compensation, employee benefits.” There, we see MDA paid $2,092,630 more this year than they did last year to executives and employees.
They spent $14,912,477 on grants, and $26,112,512 on employees and benefits.
Salaries and compensations account for nearly double of the amount of research grants awarded yet again.
Even though they brought in less money, they still found a way to raise salaries and benefits by over $2 million.
The highest compensated employees section indicated some interesting changes. President and CEO Donald Wood took a small pay cut, but don’t worry — he still made over half a million dollars last year. The entry I found intriguing, though, was the one for the third-highest paid executive last year, Secretary and Chief Legal Officer Henry Lanman. Lanman’s base compensation nearly doubled since 2022, going from $188,632 to $357,404. When you factor in additional compensations and nontaxable benefits from both years, Lanman was compensated $142,614 more in 2023 than in 2022.
In addition, MDA paid $129,070 for legal advice from Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP. This normally wouldn’t cause pause since most, if not all, non-profits have legal fees. But coupled with the huge raise for their chief legal officer, it makes me wonder if something happened that required more legal expertise than what they normally needed.
While we don’t have all the information for 2023 from the International Association of Fire Fighters yet, since LM-2s don’t go by calendar years, it looks like MDA was still on track to pay the IAFF $650,000 in 2023 since they had already paid $325,000 through June. This would mean that, once again, MDA will have paid more to the IAFF than to their largest research grant recipient, who was awarded $508,290. I’m hoping MDA will end up proving me wrong and that those were the last payments ever made to the IAFF for reasons even fire fighters themselves have questioned, but we’ll have to wait on the latest LM-2 to come out later this year to know for sure since MDA hasn’t explicitly listed them in their tax filings.
But going by their tax returns alone, MDA is showing us that when you’re making a donation, you’re donating more to the pay of their executives than you are to neuromuscular disease research. You’re donating more to the pay of their executives than you are to helping fund wheelchairs, braces, flu shots, support groups, or even “MDA Care Center” visits, because the amount MDA currently pays for those is $0.
Please remember that as you are asked for a donation at the checkout or to fill the boot.
