Rachel Brice

While community support organizations pre-date the Revenue Act of 1913 and the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act of 1894, non-profit organizations in the United States have clearly held tax-exempt status for well over a century. Maintaining this status is important for the success of the nonprofit sector, which exists solely to serve the public good. My PhD dissertation focused on the resilience of nonprofits in the northeast, and I am also a full-time employee of a nonprofit in New Hampshire. The public depends on the services of nonprofits to meet basic needs and provide services that would otherwise be unavailable to them. Levying a tax on nonprofit agencies would be out of line with legal precedent, and would threaten the ability of these organizations to meet the public need and provide benefit. I can tell you personally that we already operate under extremely thin margins; additional tax would be extremely harmful to the financial viability of our sector.