Washington — Two higher-education associations plan to keep close tabs on a questionnaire that the Internal Revenue Service is sending to about 400 four-year colleges across the country.
According to a joint letter dated October 3 from the two groups — the National Association of College and University Business Officers and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges — the IRS questionnaire is “ostensibly” an effort to learn more about how colleges and their foundations operate, and whether they are complying with laws covering tax-exempt organizations.
But, the two groups say, the effort is more likely to herald “a significant shift in the way colleges and universities are regulated and governed” and is “substantially more than a data-collecting exercise by the government.” The IRS’s goal, the letter says, is nothing less than a bid to “further regulate higher-education institutions,” including new rules, additional audits, and a new schedule for the Form 990, like that requested recently by Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.
Based on those suspicions of what the IRS is up to, the two associations are urging each college that receives a copy of the questionnaire to share its responses, in confidence. The two groups have engaged the accounting firm of Ernst & Young to analyze the responses. Based on that analysis, the groups will decide whether to issue a public summary and report of the aggregated responses.
Senator Grassley said today that if the colleges were sharing their responses with the higher-education groups, he’d like to see copies of the completed questionnaires as well. In a written statement, he said that independent groups, particularly those outside academe, “should have the ability to review the data and make their own conclusions,” and not just accept the findings of a “higher education group-funded study.”
Seven other higher-education organizations have endorsed the effort by Nacubo and the AGB: the American Association of Community Colleges, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the American Association of Universities, the American Council on Education, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. —Andrew Mytelka