The Urban Institute publishes a Legal Compendium that provides information on US state regulation of charitable entities and fundraisers. It is a fascinating spreadsheet because it covers the state-level regulation of US charities in the complicated US system.
Here is how they describe the Legal Compendium:
The Legal Compendium is a downloadable Excel spreadsheet with statutory citations showing the following information for each of the 56 jurisdictions featured in this research: the grant of jurisdiction to attorneys general and other state agencies, the registration and reporting requirements applicable to charitable entities and their fundraisers, the oversight responsibilities of state charity regulators in connection with certain transactions involving charitable entities, the obligations of charities to notify the attorney general of those transactions, some enforcement remedies available to charity regulators, and some of the requirements regarding the solicitation of charitable funds.
The Excel Spreadsheet has 3 components – Description, Front and Backsources. The description is an overview. Front covers the 56 jurisdictions in the research, and backsources give more details.
We often complain in Canada about the complexity of our charity regulation. In fact, we are very lucky in that most of the charity regulation in Canada comes from the federal government (Finance and the Charities Directorate) through the regulation of registered charities. We only have one province that is significantly involved with the regulation of ‘charities’, and that is Ontario. In fact, Ontario, over the last few years, has made many changes to lighten the load of charities that operate in Ontario. Ontario has reduced a lot of the duplicative regulation that was quite unnecessary.
In America, you don’t only have the IRS at the Federal level, but you also have dozens of states with their Attorney Generals that have different requirements relating to areas such as registration, reporting, fundraising, dealing with charitable property, etc. So we are actually, I think, quite lucky in Canada.