Yeah that must be it thanks
"It's expensive but it's not that expensive relative to your earnings" is not a legitimate justification of fees. I want to know where the money goes and why
As a not-for-profit organization with a monopoly on physician licensure, the NBME has a duty to not collect fees far in excess of operating costs, lest they either lose their not-for-profit status or be investigated for anti competitive practices and have a fee reduction
True, but that does become dicey as operating costs can be inflated. Check out any non-profit University that builds unnecessarily over-the-top projects, and pays exorbitantly high salaries to administrators and coaches, to ensure no profit is left over at the end of the year.
Oh I'm well aware of that, but we don't even have transparent accounting at this point that we can criticize.
Wow! That's a lot of words that didn't say anything.
I wonder if an anti-trust lawsuit might work on those guys?
Doubtful, that kind of stuff is very hard to do for professions like ours. There is a lot of leeway given.
This is usually the typical response of some of the posters here. I swear a few posters in SDN are working for NBME.
How are they getting to $161million in expenses? I see $52 million. Are we just supposed to ignore how they spend the other ~$110 million to get that number?
The only thing that makes me uncomfortable about that 990 is ~280 million dollars in securities. Why do they need that? Cant they sell off some of those assets to reduce costs to the end user? That is like 2 years of expenses if the end up collecting zero fees. The other thing that is annoying is the Kevin MD article estimating USMLE fees collected when it could have taken them 3 minutes and half a brain to find the 990.
I totally get that, it is just the point when your investment portfolio consists of ~20% of net revenues, or holding on to such a large portfolio. Maybe having a years worth of securities on hand. Im not sure of what is considered best practice in the non-profit world though so maybe having such a large chunk of change around is normal. And it's not like it a university that needs an endowment. It just seems like you would apply some of that money towards the mission.
In the long run the market has netted an annual 5%+ on average for the past ~150 years or so. I'll take those odds.
At some point you'd reach enough discontent to cause problems. One needs only look at the ABIM's MOC program to see what that looks like.
this is not how non-profit gaming works. Usually that works by excess bloat in the organization, you spend an unnecessary amount of money in services or hiring for-profit subcontractors and give your execs and employees fat bonuses. The 990 for the NBME doesnt paint such a picture, Their executive compensation is 5% , and their private contracting is limited, there are valid questions about the size of the organization that can be raised but without a financial statement or analysis of similar non-profits . Its not like the managers of this organization stand to get the 100 million in reserves. Nor are there stock holders who will get dividend payouts. Plus non-profits still need to be profitable to survive, it is just that their profits are not making stock holders or company owners rich.
But if you bring an antitrust case, as is currently happening with the ABIM, government accountants get full access to the books and can determine for themselves if things are appropriate. Perhaps we are approaching that point with the NBME.
I think he was let go at some point , and some of it may be parting fee's or breaking of contract, or a golden parachute, who knows?. The current president makes about 750K. Which is inline with executive compensation at non-profits of this size.
