Monday, April 4, 2016

ASAN's 2014 tax forms out: Ari Ne'eman's salary more than doubles in less than four years

ASAN has recently posted their 2014 tax return.  Though ASAN started in 2006, they were not granted 501(c) tax exempt status until 2011.  On reviewing their 2011 return we see that Ne'eman paid himself a salary of $40,000 a year for running ASAN.

In 2012 Ne'eman raised his own salary to $65,000 a year, a 62% increase, while the organization's revenues increased by only about half that percent.  Interestingly enough, one of ASAN's and neurodiversity's talking points against autism speaks was the high compensation that some of the executives at AS received.  In 2010, Autism Speaks' then president Mark Roithmayr was paid a salary of $400,000.  He in fact had a five year contract for two million dollars.  Neurodiversity and ASAN in particular made autism speaks out to be a bunch of greedy pigs who were taking money from the autism community by paying their president so generously.  However, one has to look at the bigger picture.  Roithmayr was paid $400,000 a year in 2010 out of more than 50 million dollars in revenue.  In 2012, Ari Ne'eman was paid $65,000 a year out of about $375,000 in revenue.  This means that Ne'eman's salary was nearly twenty times higher than Roithmayr's in ratio.

In 2013, Ne'eman's salary was $71,000 a year, though a more modest increase, it was still more than 10% in one year.

According to the latest 2014 figures, neurodiversity has still been as profitable for Ne'eman as ever as his annual salary was $80,000 or $83,588.00 including all of his compensation.   

This means that his salary more than doubled in four years (or maybe technically less time than that).  He's received an average annual salary increase of more than 25% a year since ASAN was granted non-profit status by the IRS.

In 2012, proportionately Ne'eman's most profitable year, about 17% of ASAN's revenues went to pay his salary alone.  In 2014, ASAN's revenue was $765,282.00, so even though a lower proportion went to pay his salary in 2014, it was still more than 10% of the organization's total revenue. 

If you look at one of their two accomplishments in terms of what the organization has done, trying to provide better health care options for autistics, you see that less money was spent on that than on Ne'eman's salary.

On public advocacy, they spent more than $360,000.  I wonder if this includes airfare tickets to various autism speaks walks where it is known certain ASAN supporters go to harass parents who are trying to raise money to help their kids.

We see that more than a third of ASAN's revenue in 2014 was spent on employee salaries and other compensation.

Are Autism Speaks the only ogres who are ripping off the autism community or is there a certain pot calling the kettle black?

I wonder when congress will get some common sense and change the laws that make it so easy for people to start a charitable organization and get nonprofit status from the IRS and give themselves such huge compensation rather than helping those in need.  

6 comments:

spinoff said...

I suppose that means that Mark Rothmayr deservers his worth 400.000 plus then....
For what?. For lightening up in blue all kind of buidings on this side of the Athlantic, having small sports teams with blue shirts to raffle before the match, polititians with blue rods etc So autism is blue, that is over here right wing, and who can challenge that on the left or centre, they are disabled ? And the provisions for services for the true disabled particularly adults, is black.
The official figure of 1 per cent is the dogma of an ideologý which has no other purpose than to sell more autism under the theme of awareness but in actual fact is a tool for small deals and miserable business between politiians parents associations and operators, at times the three things in one bottle, and this backed up by proffesionals who want to sell ABA, and more antipsychotics at all costs even through practices of mobbing those who do not agree and looking to the other side when kids are bullied and excluded.
As far as I am concerned the only worng thing with Nee'man is that he does not come over here with a multi-colour campaign as efective as that of A.S.

......I'm Anonymous said...

Who is giving ASAN those funds?

jonathan said...

The special hope foundation gave them a $300,000 three year grant, Mitsubishi corporation funded them again, they got some money from Freddie Mac, even though Freddie Mac is billions of dollars in debt to the taxpayers. There were some others, but I can't recall off the top of my head, you can easily find the rest by looking at their 2014 990 form which I linked to in the post. One interesting point is that a minor portion of their revenue, a little over 12 grand, came from membership dues. This means that if the minimum membership due is about 30 something bucks and every single person gave the minimum (which seems unlikely) they don't have more than about 400 dues paying members in all of the united states and canada where they have some chapters. Does not seem like a huge membership for an organization whose CEO made more than $80,000 in 2014 and their membership revenue was lower than in 2013, and Ne'eman still raised his own salary by about 17%. He probably makes close to $100K now.

Anonymous said...

I joined the local ASAN chapter for a bit. Six months was about all I could take. They generally started all meetings explaining that they are not just about autism advocacy. That they did advocacy for all groups. Which is true, for a autism group they only spent about 20% of the meeting on autism. The rest was.. well, lets put it this way. I was first shamed for being white. Then at another meeting I was shamed for being male. Then shamed for being Cis-gendered. They are just a SJW group run wild. But it gets better. At the last meeting I went to I was shamed for having aspergers. I was accused of being a "aspie elitist". I said I had aspergers because that is what my diagnosis is. Why would I lie and say anything else. Can you imagine that? I was shamed for having aspergers at a ASAN meeting. And from a group that claims to support autistic people. How messed up is that? When I tried to support my phrase, the co-leader of the group, a self-proclaimed self-diagnosed person with a blatant personality disorder, basically threatened me with violence. With support and acceptance like that, who needs enemies. They're a mess.

Roman Soiko said...

Autism Speaks have not contributed nothing but a Ku Klux Klan style hatred of autistics I do not suppor thtem

Elliot Jordon said...

I support finding a cure for Autism and Autism Spectrum Disorder while educating people on the importance if acceptance and tolerance of everyone is society who is unique in their own way - it saddens me to see controversy in the Autism world when energy and time could be spent learning from each other -