Major tax-exempt institutions in Boston paid at least $15 million less in voluntary contributions than requested by the city of Boston as part of a program to recoup some of the hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes that would be collected by property owners that do not enjoy tax-exempt status.
In Massachusetts, nonprofits don't pay property taxes. One result: Significant potential revenue is not, for better or worse, collected by municipalities across the Commonwealth.
The tension between municipalities supporting their most important institutions on the one hand, and missing out on often significant revenue on the other, has come under perennial scrutiny, especially when it comes to nonprofit organizations with deep pockets and which own vast tracts of valuable land—vaunted institutions like Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston University, and Harvard University, to name just a few. Those institutions own land worth billions of dollars, and for which ordinary residential or commercial owners would pay hundreds of millions of dollars in annual property taxes.
On Friday, the city of Boston published the latest numbers for its PILOT—Payment In Lieu Of Taxes—initiative, a program by which the city essentially requests that larger, well-funded nonprofits pay not what they would owe were they not exempt, but something — an amount that the city calculates to be a fair contribution.
(Disclosure: WGBH is a nonprofit institution and part of the city's PILOT program. In fiscal 2016, WGBH contributed the amount requested by the city of Boston: $135,000, including another $135,000 in "community benefits," or in-kind donations.)
WGBH News's Data Desk did a quick analysis of the latest figures, and here's what we found:
