I think the fitness/suitability of major leaders (at least to the extent we are talking about a time when SBF was on the board) and major donor acceptability evaluation are inherently in scope for any charitable organization or movement.
Do most charitable organizations have in-house people to examine donors? I’m not saying we shouldn’t check, but rather that there shouldn’t be people in EA organizations whose job is to do this—rather than organizations just hiring auditors or whomever to do it for them.
Charitable organisations generally do due diligence on large donors and will most likely do this in-house in most cases (perhaps with some external support) - very large organisations (eg Universities) will usually have a specialised in-house team independent from the rest of the operations to do this. It is also likely that at least the larger EA organisations did do due diligence on donations from Sam/FTX, they just decided on balance that it’s fine to take the donation.
EV should have due diligence processes in place, instigated by EA’s first encounter with a disgraced crypto billionaire/major EA donor (Ben Delo).
In February 2021, CEA (the EV rebrand hadn’t happened yet) wrote:
Here’s an update from CEA’s operations team, which has been working on updating our practices for handling donations. This also applies to other organizations that are legally within CEA (80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, Forethought Foundation, and EA Funds).
“We are working with our lawyers to devise and implement an overarching policy for due diligence on all of our donors and donations going forward.
We’ve engaged a third party who now conducts KYC (know your client) due diligence research on all major donors (>$20K a year).
We have established a working relationship with TRM who conduct compliance and back-tracing for all crypto donations.
It’s unclear from that whether the due diligence scaled appropriately with size of donation. I doubt ~anyone is batting an eye at charities that took 25K-50K from SBF, due diligence or no. The process at the tens of millions per year level needs to be bespoke, though.
Yeah, fully agree with this. I hope now that EV and/or EV-affiliated people are talking more about this matter that they’ll be willing to share what specific due diligence was done before accepting SBF’s gifts and what their due diligence policies look like more generally.
Unclear, although most nonprofits are attracting significantly less risky donors than crypto people. (SBF wasn’t even the first crypto scammer sentenced to a multidecade term in the Southern District of New York in the past twelve months....)
I’d suggest that even to the extent a non-profit is generally outsourcing that kind of work, it can’t just rely on standard third-party practices where significant information with some indicia of reliability is brought directly to it.
I don’t think the EA movement as a whole can sensibly be assigned a scope, really. But I think we should collectively be open to doing whatever reasonably practicable, ethical things seem most important, without restricting ourselves to only certain kinds of behaviour fitting that description.
I’d argue that “checking whether businesses are run responsibly” is out of scope for EA in general.
I think the fitness/suitability of major leaders (at least to the extent we are talking about a time when SBF was on the board) and major donor acceptability evaluation are inherently in scope for any charitable organization or movement.
Do most charitable organizations have in-house people to examine donors? I’m not saying we shouldn’t check, but rather that there shouldn’t be people in EA organizations whose job is to do this—rather than organizations just hiring auditors or whomever to do it for them.
Charitable organisations generally do due diligence on large donors and will most likely do this in-house in most cases (perhaps with some external support) - very large organisations (eg Universities) will usually have a specialised in-house team independent from the rest of the operations to do this. It is also likely that at least the larger EA organisations did do due diligence on donations from Sam/FTX, they just decided on balance that it’s fine to take the donation.
EV should have due diligence processes in place, instigated by EA’s first encounter with a disgraced crypto billionaire/major EA donor (Ben Delo).
In February 2021, CEA (the EV rebrand hadn’t happened yet) wrote:
It’s unclear from that whether the due diligence scaled appropriately with size of donation. I doubt ~anyone is batting an eye at charities that took 25K-50K from SBF, due diligence or no. The process at the tens of millions per year level needs to be bespoke, though.
Yeah, fully agree with this. I hope now that EV and/or EV-affiliated people are talking more about this matter that they’ll be willing to share what specific due diligence was done before accepting SBF’s gifts and what their due diligence policies look like more generally.
Unclear, although most nonprofits are attracting significantly less risky donors than crypto people. (SBF wasn’t even the first crypto scammer sentenced to a multidecade term in the Southern District of New York in the past twelve months....)
I’d suggest that even to the extent a non-profit is generally outsourcing that kind of work, it can’t just rely on standard third-party practices where significant information with some indicia of reliability is brought directly to it.
I don’t think the EA movement as a whole can sensibly be assigned a scope, really. But I think we should collectively be open to doing whatever reasonably practicable, ethical things seem most important, without restricting ourselves to only certain kinds of behaviour fitting that description.
I definitely agree. But I think we’re far from it being practically useful for dedicated EAs to do this themselves.