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This stood out to me in the sustainability document: > As noted last year, the IRS has opened an audit of the Mozilla Foundation. We do not yet have a good fee
by Encosia 16y ago
This stood out to me in the sustainability document:
> As noted last year, the IRS has opened an audit of the Mozilla Foundation. We do not yet have a good feel for how long this process will take or the overall scope of what will be involved.
With so much flagrant fraud and evasion dangled in front of our faces every day in the news, it's great to know this is how the IRS is allocating its resources.
- tmiller 16y agoI remember hearing that the structure they have, where a for-profit company (Mozilla Co) is owned by a non-profit (Mozilla Foundation) is highly unusual, which of course is going to attract scrutiny.
- protomyth 16y agoMayo does the same thing.
- Perceval 16y agoIkea is also a corporation owned by a charity: http://www.economist.com/node/6919139?story_id=6919139 http://www.economist.com/node/6919139?story_id=6919139
- bryanlarsen 16y agoWow. After reading that, I'm not surprised that they want to audit the Mozilla structure. To summarize: the charity that owns IKEA is almost certainly just a tax dodge.
- wmf 16y agoIIRC the current structure is a response to the IRS audit. Originally, Google paid MoFo directly. Now Google pays MoCo, presumably MoCo pays taxes, and any surplus money can go to MoFo to be used tax-free.
- celticjames 16y agoI don't think that's the issue. I think it is more of a case of whether or not the corporation and the foundation really are two separate organizations. Until the new director of the foundation arrived (Mark Surman), the foundation didn't really appear to do anything. To the IRS, this may have looked like the foundation was only a tax shelter for the corporation and not a real thing. Now there's all this Drumbeat Festival stuff, etc.. coming out the foundation. Clearly they are trying to position themselves as a non-profit that advocates for the open web rather than just a company that gives away a browser. Owning a corporation that gives away a browser is just part of that cause. Hopefully that's how the IRS sees it. Sadly, I don't think a lot of the foundation sponsored stuff really ever links up with anything happening on the corporate side. At least from the outside, it still looks like the corporation wags the foundation and not the other way around. Edit: Yes, the foundation does own the corporation.
- techno-fitness 16y agoSpot on. For added weirdness, they've split the parts of the child company into another one called Mozilla Messaging that gives away Thunderbird. I definitely agree that the corporation appears to wear the pants in the relationship, but there is still a lot of link up that is organized by the foundation, especially with the Mozilla developer network stuff.
- protomyth 16y agoThe IRS is probably a little concerned with a 501(c)(3) earning so much revenue from "search royalties". It has the feel of a real business not a traditional non-profit.
- SkyMarshal 16y agoMozilla, and organizations like it, weren't involved in blowing up the global economy either. The IRS has its priorities all wrong, and really needs to focus its audits first on domains where fraud can and has lead to asymmetrically negative results, like the financial industry. Once they take care of those, then they can turn their attention to companies and domains where the consequences of fraud are much more localized.
- protomyth 16y agoThe type of fraud that brought it all down was more the domain of the SEC. Money is money to the IRS. There only concern is filling the coffers.