[5581] in APO Printshop
Re: Letterpress Printing - anne's jobs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitchell E Berger)
Mon Feb 2 08:31:24 2009
To: Cat Thu Nguyen Huu <catthu@MIT.EDU>
cc: "Leonard H Tower Jr." <tower@alum.MIT.EDU>, apo-printshop@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 02 Feb 2009 02:34:49 EST."
<FEB706B7-8A0B-4AC6-9945-0741C0F00F09@MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 08:31:10 -0500
From: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@MIT.EDU>
[punted apo-presidenet; it's misspelled and the President is a Press Op]
1) The idea that we can only run jobs for charities is inconsistent with
one of the major things the Printshop advertises - business cards.
We could certainly have some policy that we'll only print business
cards for people who work for charities, but we don't say that, and
it'd be pretty extreme anyway, to the point of seldom running a non-APO
job. And if you extend it to us printing business cards for anyone
in the MIT community, you're in the same situation - except for actual
employees of MIT, most business cards we'd print for a community member
would be business cards for them in their capacity as employees of
a commercial business, like their startup.
2) In the context of the AXcoAPO Printshop, we have no tax liabilities
tied to Nationals to run afoul of. We are beholden only to MIT. Our
only use of a federal tax ID number tied to Nationals is on the Sectional
Account, which is unconnected with the operating expenses and income of the
chapter and Printshop.
3) Businesses don't get married. So, the fact that we've printed wedding
invitations before means we've been content to serve not only non-for-
profit enterprises.
4) I'm not a lawyer. I'm certainly not a tax lawyer. I won't tell you
that if MIT were brought before a court of tax law to determine whether
it were acceptable for it as a 501(c)3 to have a student group print
a hundred wedding invitations each year and accept compensation for
the materials, that the court would find in MIT's favor. I'll tell
you that MIT's not going to get sued for it and isn't going to court
over it. MIT doesn't go to court even for major violations of federal
law (like the telephone billing fiasco that lost the dorms free local
phone service) most of the time.
5) The chapter as an MIT student group doesn't legally exist. We're not
a business and can't have any legal action come against us (as the
maintainers of the Sectional account, it's a different story somewhat,
but that's not related here). MIT is the only legal entity that exists.
If any problem came out of the <$100 we're looking at here, which I
assure you the federal auditors a) don't care about and b) have seen
in aggregate form over the years and not piped up about, what would occur
is that the Controller's Office would tell SAFO to tell us we shouldn't
do this any more. That's all. And we saw last term that when the
CAO is displeased with some of our finances, they clearly know how
to get the message to us.
6) We're not making serious profit; we're mostly billing for materials.
This is consistent with the spirit of a nonprofit, all actual legal
judgments aside. The Coke Fridge, and every other student group that
has a similar institution (which is a lot of them) makes much more
of a clear profit off of it, and especially if they ever let nonmembers
buy from it (which most of them do sometimes), that's probably more
of a technical legal problem... that nobody (including the IRS and MIT)
cares about.
7) Agreed that this sort of job is not a good candidate for a training
or qualifying run because of the quality expectations that will probably
come with it. However, we finally have 4 pressops who are Actives in
the Chapter, a couple other qualified alums aside from the journeymen,
and more who want to be qualified. This means that if they want to
(and we should hope that they do), we can finally start doing a bunch
of jobs that aren't training or qual runs. Like this one, perhaps.
Mitch
> Hi Len,
>
> Thank you for your email. I have to disagree with your opinion that
> service to a private individual is not service. For example, is it
> true that volunteering for a homeless shelter is called service, while
> helping a random homeless person is not? Although this is not a really
> good analogy because the degree of impact (of helping a homeless
> person and printing some invitations) is obviously different, the two
> for-individual things in each had the same degree of similarity to
> their respective things that are considered service (helping a group
> of homeless people at the shelter to helping a homeless person, and
> printing invitations for non-profit organizations to printing
> invitations for individuals). I can say much much more than this, but
> I'll stop here because I have no intention for this to become a
> discussion on how to define service, and neither do I want to convince
> anyone to change their opinion on this.
>
> I agree, however, that this _might_ not be the kind of service the
> Chapter wants to provide. And although I said what I said in the
> previous paragraph, it in fact had not occurred to me to consider the
> nature of the job and how it matches our principles; so thank you for
> reminding me about that. Nevertheless, after considering it I still
> think there's nothing wrong with printing Anne's invitations. That
> said, I was not aware of the Chapter's tax-exemption status, and I'm
> not knowledgeable enough to say whether this does have some effects or
> what we should do; so I'd like to hear someone else's opinions.
>
> I wasn't free before 4pm on Saturday, and when I came to the office
> afterwards you and other people there at that time did not seem to
> need more assistance. I'm really sorry if I misinterpreted the
> situation. Thank you for doing all this - I know the recent week has
> been a rush and all.
>
> Cat
>
>
>
> On Feb 2, 2009, at 12:47 AM, Leonard H Tower Jr. wrote:
>
> > hi cat (and apo-printshop and apo-president)
> >
> > i realized going home saturday night, that there was a second reason
> > why i did not wish to be involved with anne's wedding invitations
> >
> > it was one of the press shop items i had hoped to talked with you
> > about after the chapter meeting, but you wanted to help with book ex
> > setup, and said you preferred e-mail
> >
> > the first, which i have talked a little about via email, is that
> wedding invitations are not good jobs for training or qualifying runs
> >
> > the second is that AX shouldn't serve for-profit businesses or private
> > individuals (even members of the mit community)
> >
> > i won't do either using AX facilities
> > i wish my service to benefit non-profits and the work they do
> >
> > doing jobs for private individuals and for-profit businesses also
> > violates the 501(c)3 tax-exempt status AX has both from MIT and
> > National (it's more complicated than that, but it isn't worth the
> > paperwork, even if MIT was willing to let us submit information for
> > their 990A filing, and i expect it wouldn't pass the IRS regs in most
> > cases)
> >
> > other press ops may feel differently about that, but i won't do
> > anything further for anne's job, or jobs like it
> >
> > we have enough jobs about that can be used for training and
> > qualifying. in fact, matt just gave me another that is perfect for a
> > training run
> >
> > i'm sure that anne is a fine person, but that isn't what's important
> > here
> >
> > there is more i will email about all the above in some days or next
> > week, as well as the other half dozen or so open topics, but other
> > parts of my life need attention
> >
> > i was ill the first week of iap, and quite ill the third week, and
> > just did many days of service for ax this, the fourth week of iap:
> > helped with the APOffice reorg, helped decker with her training run,
> > did the typesetting for the reg day card over several days, helped
> > kristen run the job over almost 10 hours on saturday, etc.
> >
> > thanx
> >
> > yiLFS -len
>
