HealthBlawg

David Harlow's Health Care Law Blog

    • Twitter
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • RSS
    • Email
  • About
  • Archives
  • Podcast
  • Press
  • Awards/Reviews
  • HIPAA
  • HCSM

Tax-exempt hospitals focus their response to the IRS, which is questioning their status

October 19, 2006

The IRS inquiry into the tax-exempt status of not-for-profit hospitals continues (i.e., do such hospitals provide community benefits, including charity care, sufficient to justify their tax-exempt status?), and hospital associations and their advisors continue to react to the IRS questionnaire that was sent out to hospitals a while back (see earlier post). 

The AHA wrote a letter to the IRS about ten days ago, pointing out problems with the questionnaire.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers released a report last month entitled My Brother’s Keeper: Growing expectations confront hospitals on community benefits and charity care (available here; registration may be required).  It’s a good read, and is based in part on roundtable discussions with some hospital executives. 

The key recommendations in the PwC report are very pragmatic:

• Review community needs not only at the hospital level, but over larger geographic areas, by teaming with business, community and political leaders.
• Conduct an economic impact study to quantify in dollars additional community benefits generated by the hospital.
• Publicize community benefit results to inform the public about progress to improve the overall health of the community.
• Adopt the CHA/VHA Community Benefit guidelines for both community reporting and on IRS Form 990. Commit to adopting the CHA/VHA guidelines regarding bad debt and Medicare shortfalls by 2010.
• Report charity care at cost, not charges.
• Enhance board involvement in  setting charity care policies, with periodic evaluations of performance.
• Educate and distribute the charity care policy to all hospital employees.
• Clarify policies to clearly identify charity care, as distinguished from bad debt.
• Simplify the charity care application process by integrating technology at the front-end of the qualification process.

The executive summary of the Catholic Health Association (CHA) guidelines on community benefits is available here.  CHA guidance on completing Form 990 released in May is available here.

In September, per a CHA press release, Senator Charles Grassley, who has been spearheading the inquiry into tax-exempt status of hospitals, praised the CHA’s efforts, and noted:

The IRS is creating a supplemental report to the Form 990 to include additional information from non-profit hospitals and their charity care and community benefit. I hope the IRS will give strong consideration to having that new information requirement conform with CHA guidelines.

— David Harlow

Filed Under: Health Law, Hospitals, IRS, Tax exempt

you might also like:

  1. Charity care at tax-exempt hospitals: how much is enough? for the IRS? for Sen. Grassley?

  2. IRS releases draft revisions to form 990 – annual report for tax-exempt entities including hospitals

  3. Senators Grassley and Baucus looking for greater tax-exempt transparency

« . . . And then there were four (Massachusetts CON applications for linear accelerators)
CDHPs and HSAs: Some spend more and some spend less »

Comments

  1. Eric Rasmusen says

    May 22, 2007 at 9:26 pm

    I blogged on this subject a few days ago. I don’t know about how the accounting works, either for tax or non-profit purposes, and would be grateful if anyone could point me to a reference on how hospitals are supposed to measure charity and bad debts. My blog entry is:

    http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/05/21/hospital-accounting/

Follow me on Twitter

David Harlow 💉😷 Follow 42,915 17,570

Mastodon @healthblawg@c.im #HealthCare #MedDevice #Compliance #Privacy @MyOmnipod #HIPAA #digitalhealth #HarlowOnHC #pinksocks Tweets are tweets No more no less

healthblawg
healthblawg avatar; David Harlow 💉😷 @healthblawg ·
2h 1620898131004072027

The Harlow #Healthcare #Innovation Daily #digitalhealth #hcldr #HarlowOnHC Thanks to @Mr_Don_Auto @KardonHIPAA @vadernauts #digitalhealth #healthtech

Image for twitter card

'She handed the police my entire prescription list': Customer claims CVS called the police on him, violated HIPAA

dailydot.com A TikToker revealed a CVS Pharmacy pharmacist called him “insane” and reported him to police ...

paper.li

Reply on Twitter 1620898131004072027 Retweet on Twitter 1620898131004072027 0 Like on Twitter 1620898131004072027 0 Twitter 1620898131004072027
healthblawg avatar; David Harlow 💉😷 @healthblawg ·
5h 1620842034113175552

ICYMI> Interoperability and NLP with Kyle Silvestro, CEO of SyTrue — Harlow On Healthcare https://healthblawg.com/2022/03/interoperability-nlp-sytrue.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ReviveOldPost #digitalhealth #hcldr #hitsm

Image for the Tweet beginning: ICYMI>  Interoperability and NLP Twitter feed image.
Reply on Twitter 1620842034113175552 Retweet on Twitter 1620842034113175552 0 Like on Twitter 1620842034113175552 0 Twitter 1620842034113175552
healthblawg avatar; David Harlow 💉😷 @healthblawg ·
8h 1620801819612946434

The latest Harlow On Health Care Daily #HarlowOnHC #digitalhealth #healthcare #innovation #privacy #hcldr Thx: @TWDigitalHealth @MrsYisWhy @thecommunityvc #digitalhealth #healthtech

Image for twitter card

Artificial intelligence model finds potential drug molecules a thousand times faster

techxplore.com The entirety of the known universe is teeming with an infinite number of molecules. But what fraction...

paper.li

Reply on Twitter 1620801819612946434 Retweet on Twitter 1620801819612946434 0 Like on Twitter 1620801819612946434 0 Twitter 1620801819612946434
Load More
Follow me on Mastodon

HIPAAtools

Hipaatools

The HIPAA Compliance Toolkit

The Walking Gallery

The Walking Gallery

Quick Links

  • Home
  • Categories
  • Archives
  • Podcast Interviews
  • HIPAAtools
  • HIPAA Compliance
  • Health Care Social Media
  • Speaking
  • In the Press
  • Blogroll

David Harlow

David Harlow

HealthcareNOW Radio

Connect with David

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Email
  • Subscribe
  • Contact
  • Book Me: Speaking
  • About
  • The Harlow Group LLC
Copyright © 2006–2023
HealthBlawg is a publication of The Harlow Group LLC. See Copyright notice and disclaimer.
Fair use with attribution and a link is encouraged. Click for more on David Harlow.
[footer_backtotop text="Back to top" href="#"]