Every year, Florida homeowners and small-business owners open their property-tax bills and pay them. Thousands of nonprofit hospitals, universities and foundations across the state never get that bill. They are exempt. Many of them earn that exemption many times over. They treat the sick, teach our children and serve people who have nowhere else to turn. But a tax break is public money, and the public has a right to know what it is buying. Right now, there’s no easy way to find out. Consider the hospitals. Some nonprofit hospitals run like billion-dollar corporations, with large administrative staffs, well-paid executives, real estate portfolios and construction cranes on the skyline. Many deliver outstanding care. Yet if you try to find out what a hospital’s tax exemption is worth, how much charity care it actually provides or how much goes to executives and consultants, you end up buried in hundreds of pages of filings written for accountants, not taxpayers. The same holds for universities, foundations and large charities. They own property, collect government grants and contracts, and raise donations. A nonprofit is allowed to bring in substantial revenue. That isn’t the issue. The issue is whether anyone outside the organization can see how much of that money reaches the people it was created to serve. To be clear, I support nonprofits. Many do work no one else will do, for children, seniors and families who can’t afford basic services. The good ones have nothing to fear from daylight. The best of them would welcome the chance to show what they accomplish. So here is a proposal: one statewide nonprofit accountability dashboard covering all 67 Florida counties. For each major tax-exempt institution, it would list the value of its exempt property, the estimated property taxes it doesn’t pay, annual revenue, operating expenses, executive pay, government funding and measurable community benefit. Searchable by county. Searchable by organization. Readable by anyone. Most of the financial data already exists. The Lown Institute compares nonprofit hospitals’ tax breaks nationwide against what they put back into their communities. The Florida Department of Revenue publishes county property-tax and exemption figures. The IRS collects revenue, expense and executive compensation data from larger nonprofits, and nonprofit hospitals report their community benefits. The numbers sit in separate files in separate offices. Nobody has put them side by side. Dollars alone won’t tell the whole story. Spending is not the same as results. The dashboard should also show outcomes: how many uninsured patients were treated, how many families were helped, how many students received scholarships. Those numbers aren’t reported in one consistent way today, so this is where nonprofits would need to step up. Then taxpayers could weigh what an exemption costs against what it delivers. This doesn’t need a study commission or a report that sits on a shelf. It needs state legislators, county property appraisers and nonprofit leaders in the same room, agreeing on a format and building it. Start in Miami-Dade County. Identify the largest nonprofit institutions, calculate the value of their exemptions and line those figures up against their reported community benefits. Then do the same in Broward and Palm Beach counties. Once the model works across South Florida, take it statewide. Nobody is asking to strip away legitimate exemptions. The goal is to know what they’re worth and what Floridians get in return. Show us the property. Show us the salaries. Show us the results. Tax-exempt should never mean accountability-exempt. Questions, comments or suggestions? Call or text Grant Miller at 305-323-8206. The post Tax-Exempt Doesn’t Mean Accountability-Exempt appeared first on Miami’s Community News. ...read more read less