Well, it appears that they’ve FINALLY filed tax forms for the year they shut down, and the most interesting thing is their answer to question #31:
Did the organization liquidate, terminate, or dissolve and cease operations? no
They also ended the fiscal year with $131k in assets with NO liabilities. Are they planning a return to operations??
i’m registered for this year’s columbia. what does this mean for this year this year?
Interesting. However, keep in mind that they had taken in the revenues for Eagleman and Columbia but never took on the expenses of actually producing those events, which are far more than the $131K of assets they ended up with.
I get that, but how does this make sense? Exceeding previous revenue for 4 years in a row, and then suddenly a catastrophic drop. How does that make sense?
It smells funky!
There’s an awful lot of how CTA up and fold overnight that smells funky. I won’t pretend that I can explain it.
Their revenue had been more or less equally split between “Contributions and Grants” and “Program Service Revenue”. In FY2012 at least, neither of these alone are large enough to account for the registration fee revenue they would have received from Eagleman plus Columbia, not to mention their other events IronGirl, ChesapeakeMan, etc… So, that is odd. Then in 2013 the “Contributions and Grants” portion effectively goes to zero, which is why their total revenue falls off a cliff for that year. They also managed a negative 63K in investment income that year. Wonder how they pulled off such an investment loss on so few total assets.
Funky? yes.
All the 990s dating back to 2003 can be found here and what’s really funky is that as a non-profit they didn’t even have a board of directors until 2010, and maybe they found some funkyness because legal and accounting expenses go up considerably from then on: 11,497/15,634 in 2010, 23,903/ 68,890 in 2011, 54,909/52,812 in 2012, and 19,994/91,182 in 2013. And then the board changed almost completely in 2013, with only one hold over from 2012.
And while income rose slightly from 2011 to 2012, most other expenses seemed pretty flat except licensing fees which go from 100,000 to 226,000. Salaries are actually down in 2012, but then again, that was when Vigo retired.
In 2013, revenue tanked to under a million with a new board and new staff. Its as if they weren’t even trying.
My guess is that historically they recognized just the portion of registration fees that covered the event production expenses as Service Revenue and recognized the remainder as Contributions/Grants, which means that some portion of everyones registration for CTA events from 2003 through 2012 should have been tax-deductible. Then in 2013 when they transferred their events over to WTC and Ulman all revenue was transferred as well with the exception of revenue to match expenses already incurred for producing the canceled events. This would explain why Contribution/Grants went to zero but Service Revenue did not and would explain why revenue for 2013 plummeted even though the events had sold out like always.
Clearly it was a mess over there. And “retired” is a liberal use of the word for Vigo’s departure.
It’s a shame because CTA put on great, iconic events. But, they never should have been a 501c3 in the first place.
I’m pretty sure their registration confirmation did have language about a portion of registration fees being tax deductible.
Also, their fiscal year ran October - September, so the 2013 900 covers October 2013 - September 2014, and they had only opened a couple of events, and much later than normal, I want to say January rather than October or November, and they clearly didn’t sell-out because then revenue would have been much higher. I think Columbia had 1000 rather than 2500 that year.
“Retired” isn’t the right word?
This is all fascinating and I’m glad you can interpret what the numbers mean. I had done Tricolumbia races since back in 2000, and did the very last race put on in 2013, Chesapeakeman. I know that race was largely a flop but there was also Irongirl which always sold out early (as did Eagleman when it had the Kona slots).
I’m not an accountant but I’ve sat on nonprofit boards before, and none of this adds up. Seems like there was a good bit of “Founder’s Syndrome” going on, which happens a lot when a nonprofit grows big enough that the founders start to feel like owners, and nonprofits can’t be “owned”
Maybe that was going on here and someone took notice and started to make changes a few years ago. Suddenly there was a board of directors (as noted on the 2010 990) and a different accountant. And then the founder retires (or something else as eluded to by kny) and the board turns over almost completely. I went back and read through some of the reports from their closing 2 years ago, and the new board replaced the entire staff in the fall of 2013, claiming mismanagement and bad decisions, but while these 990s don’t show everything, it appears that things continued just fine through the 2013 race season, so it doesn’t make sense at all. If kny is right about Vigo’s departure, maybe the company was torpedoed out of spite or retaliation.