Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Back to Opinion

One More Thing About the Salary Survey

Thinkstock

Sagi Balasha wants you to know that he makes more than you may think. In fact, twice as much.

The CEO of the Israeli-American Council is listed in the latest Forward salary survey as earning only $93,900 a year, making him the second most underpaid on our annual list of executives of national Jewish charities.

Turns out that his actual salary is $191,000. And therein lies a lesson.

The Israeli-American Council is a newcomer to our annual survey; we added it to our list of prominent national nonprofits because it is growing rapidly in size and influence. Perhaps that’s why the IAC didn’t quite understand the importance and urgency of answering the many phone calls and emails from the Forward seeking to verify the information it had filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

That information, on something called the Form 990, is the basis of our reporting for this complex project. But we only start there. A certain lag time is allowed for nonprofits to publicly report their salaries and other budgetary information, which they are required to do as tax exempt organizations. Since we try to present the most up-to-date information, we reach out to every one of the organizations on our list at least a month before our deadline.

The IAC initially verified the lower salary, which dated back to 2012, when the organization was much smaller. IAC officials contacted us with the higher 2013 salary only thirty minutes before our print deadline last week. And we can’t just stop the presses. Our data was already extensively analyzed by our partners at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, so to add another nearly $100,000 to someone’s salary would have thrown off all the calculations and required many, many hours of adjustment, something I simply could not do.

The leaders of a few other organizations tell us they are upset because a new CEO is sometimes listed with his or her predecessor’s salary. (That happened this year here and here and here.) Again, that is legal according to the IRS, given the allowable lag time, but there’s an easy way to avoid such confusion for our readers. Give us the most up-to-date information and we’ll publish it.

The Forward can only get this right if the charities themselves give us the right information. So we hope that next year, with the help of these organizations, we’ll be able to present an even more accurate picture of CEO compensation.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.