Joe, I think you do the Mudcat a disservice by your continued insistance that it is not a tax exempt organization. As our anonymous Guest has posted, the home page for Mudcat (probably one which the majority of us miss on our way directly to the threads) does state that both Mudcat and the Digital Tradition are "registered non-profit organizations." If this is true, those entities had to claim that status - it isn't just given automagically.

That said, I think there is some confusion operating here that a tax exempt organization is automatically a charitable one, i.e., that donations made toward its expenses are tax deductible. I believe both Max and Dick have been very specific that neither entity has been granted charitable organization status by any government agency.

It's also been stated in the other thread on this subject that an IRS form 990 is not required of a non-profit which receives less than $25,000 gross receipts in a year. I suspect that both the DT and Mudcat fall well within that exemption. And, if memory serves me right, Max did give some general figures for operating expenses and donation receipts when 'Spaw's "Pledge Drive" was going on last year.

So, it probably comes down to the essentially the same thing as what you said last: Anybody dissatisfied with the level of disclosure of DT and Mudcat financials probably shouldn't donate. Those who are convinced that they've gotten far more benefit from both than what they've put into them will probably continue to do so. But if anybody thinks that Dick and Max have some legal requirement to make the organizations' finances public to us all, s/he is laboring under a false assumption.