Exempt Organizations

As exempt organizations are becoming an increasingly powerful force in the national economy, their programs and operations are becoming far more complex. With assets measured in the trillions of dollars, this area includes charities, churches, schools, health care organizations, foundations, and social welfare organizations, as well as professional and trade associations. We understand the sophisticated business operations and financial management required to run a successful exempt organization. As pressure to find creative sources of revenue mounts and business transactions with for-profit organizations on the rise, the complexity of your tax issues continues to increase.

To operate successfully in this environment, an exempt organization needs a team of lawyers who understand exempt organizations as a whole and can offer strategic advice on the array of tax, business, cultural, and political issues that are distinct to them. As U.S. News – Best Law Firms 2020 “Law Firm of the Year” in Tax Law, Alston & Bird fulfills that need. We understand the special needs and interests of exempt organizations involved in business transactions, and we see our role as that of collaborative problem solver—not just risk assessor. Ours is a “can do” approach: we find ways to make transactions work and to enable our clients to take advantage of opportunities as they arise.

• In our ongoing representation of major college and university endowments, we have structured a wide array of investment vehicles in the most tax-favored manner, avoiding the imposition of potentially significant income taxes on investment returns.
• We represent one of the largest health-related charitable organizations in the country and have day-to-day involvement in that organization’s business affairs and transactions.
• We reorganized the largest medical clinic/faculty practice group in the country from a for-profit general partnership to a tax-exempt Section 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.
• In our ongoing representation of one of the largest U.S. banks, which has acquired other banks all over the country, we have merged countless bank-sponsored foundations into our client's foundation. In each of those transactions, we guided our client through the maze of private foundation rules and restrictions all of the bank-sponsored foundations are subject to.
• We have established, and represent, a number of “friends of” type Section 501(c)(3) organizations for substantial foreign charities engaged in fundraising and other activities in the U.S.
• In our ongoing representation of one of the largest community foundations in the country, we reorganized the foundation from a charitable trust to a nonprofit corporation. As part of our representation, not only did we solve serious tax problems for the foundation, but we also negotiated a legal structure for it that altogether eliminated the governance and control involvement of the financial institutions that created the foundation.
• Over the years we have reorganized a large number of Section 501(c)(3) hospitals into multientity health care systems. More recently, we have represented a number of hospitals and health care organizations involved in conversion transactions. We now represent a large number of so-called conversion foundations created in the acquisition of nonprofit hospitals by for-profit chains.
• Through a series of complex option transactions, we made it possible for a client whose S Corporation was going public to transfer a substantial interest in the company to a number of charitable remainder trusts.
• We created and now represent a charitable organization that provides financial and technical assistance to Georgia cities in the development and rehabilitation of their downtown areas.