T2Eagle

Yes. It is supplemental to the auto insurance.

Just so I'm clear, supplemental to the auto insurance of whoever is pulling it right?

Is that liability, comprehensive/collision?  Do you know if it covers either trailer or contents when it's just sitting in the parking lot?

Moderator's Note:

 

www.scouter.com is not a source of tax or legal advice.  Consult with your local Council's General Counsel or the attorney for your Chartered Partner for legal advice that applies to your specific unit situation.

What was it Beavah used to say?  Don't take legal advice from some furry critter on the internet?

Who holds the insurance on the trailer?

We don't carry separate insurance on our trailer; I need to talk to the legal eagles on the committee at the time of purchase and see if that was a deliberate decision or not.  

Does your Troop or CO carry a separate policy for the trailer?

I posted the link higher up that covered some scenarios that are probably accurate in terms of what happens if the trailer is damaged or causes damage.  

While going down the road, liability arising from an accident involving the trailer is probably going to be covered by the insurance of the vehicle pulling it.  If there's a lot of money involved and/or some question concerning whether the accident is actually because of the trailer then the CO will probably be pulled in as the owner.  If the CO has collision or comprehensive insurance, it's possible that will cover the trailer and its contents, but that's highly dependent on the policy and if the CO is willing to file a claim.  I tried to figure out from my insurance policy whether the trailer is covered by my collision/comprehensive, I don't think it is, but it is also possible that since I don't own the trailer the Troop/CO could file a claim against me for an accident that was my fault and my insurer would pay off under the liability coverage of my policy.   My homeowners and umbrella policy could also come into play if there was a loss caused by me.

We store our trailer on the CO's property so any loss while there would be covered by whatever property insurance,if any, that they would have.  That would also be subject to them being willing to file the claim.

The trailer had already been a topic for recent discussions for us in the committee, that and these threads have me deciding to dig a little deeper.

No inspections of any vehicles where I live now.  I grew up in PA which had semi-annual inspections of all cars.  I found the inspections really annoying and expensive when I lived there, now I'm appalled at the obvious "beaters" I see being driven down the road.

Ours is registered in the name of the Troop, with the address of the troop treasurer's home.  I recognize that the Troop has no independent legal existence, but this was done before my time, and no one at the DOT apparently ever questioned it.  

 

Our CO is an American Legion unit.

This is how our trailer is registered.  We are chartered by a Catholic parish.  Our state  does not require a SS# or EIN to register a trailer.

Blw2, for your situation it sounds like the trailer is registered to the troop and it's just the former SM's address so really you should be able to just change the address to another leader without too much trouble.

A couple of thoughts on the relationship with your CO, as I mentioned we are also chartered by a Catholic parish.  You seem to want your CO to do things that they don't want to do and you feel that what they're doing is somehow "wrong."  You want things like the registration to reflect their ownership and you want them to receive things like the bank statements and trailer registration.   But there's no compelling reason for that to happen, you and the committee are stewards of the funds and assets of the troop, there's no reason for you not to be receiving the mail relating to these things, and there's no reason for them to have to handle that mail anymore than they need to handle all the various mailings that the council and district might send out about camporees, summer camp, etc.  In their eyes you may be just making more work for their office staff.

As mentioned in another thread, the legal relationship between the unit and the CO is what it is, irrespective of the feelings or beliefs of the CO.  In the case of the Catholic Church, they have over 100 years of experience chartering Boy Scout units.  Whether your pastor or the business manager of the parish understand in detail what the legal ramifications of chartering a unit are, you can be very assured that at the diocesan level and nationally at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) there is no misunderstanding about both the risks and intricacies related to Catholic parishes chartering scout units.  So making someone at the local level acknowledge the intricacies of the relationship and asking the parish to do more than it wants to do, especially in what are really not meaningful things like processing the mail, may be more trouble than it's worth.

There are almost 9000 units sponsored by the Catholic Church.  There are therefore literally thousands of troop trailers owned by the Catholic Church, no matter how they're registered.  If this was a problem it would have been handled long before now..

For anyone interested, I found a good synopsis of how trailer liability works.  It is referring to trailers owned by a university but controlled by individual departments, and it is very closely analogous to a unit and CO owned trailer.

https://www.umsystem.edu/newscentral/infocus/2013/01/15/how-insurance-is-applied-to-trailers-in-various-situations/

 

If a company donates to the scouts under the CO's EIN and it is a for profit, then the company can't get a deduction and the scouts count that as 100% income taxable profit.

 

The whole issue is more than just paying sales taxes on purchases.  A non-profit CO can take in income without owing income tax, a for profit CO can't   And as I posted before when a scout unit buys at a local store a non-profit CO unit doesn't pay sales tax, but a for profit CO unit does, and if over the internet will need to pay use tax instead. 

 

BSA does not make any of this clear in any of it's literature that I have seen.  I think they are riding on ethical thin ice and as long as no one gets caught, it's okay.  Not a lesson I want my boys to learn.

I am not a tax lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that the cost of a unit to a for-profit CO are probably tax deductible either as a charitable donation or general business deduction.  SO pretty much everything you mention washes itself out as far as tax having to be paid by the CO.

You first mention someone donating to the scouts and the scouts counting it as income taxable profit.  The scouts aren't an entity so they don't file a return, there is no such thing as income to the scouts.  Likely, the money donated to the scouts would be income to the CO but immediately offset as deductible because it passed through to the scouts --- so except for some bookkeeping, the tax liability of the CO doesn't change.  Sales tax is very state specific, but in my state businesses generally do not have to pay sales tax, and if they do it is deductible as an expense.  The unit's purchases are subject to the same rules so there is likely to be no tax liability for that either.

Stosh,

How many for-profit COs do you know of?  I don't know of any at all, I am sure there are none in my district and I'm reasonably sure there are none in my council.

To the extent a for-profit CO is sponsoring a unit I would assume some knowledge and awareness on their part about what tax laws apply to them.  For non profits the tax laws generally say that income they generate is not taxable, you can screw this up if you work at it, like the case with the gymnastics' parents, but you do have to work at it.  The laws are actually written and designed so as to make the non-profit income non-taxable.

Much the same can be said about sales tax.  In my state non profits generally do not have to charge sales tax for things they sell, nor do they have to pay sales tax for things they buy.  ETA I will need to research this some more, I know my Church does not need to charge sales tax, but the Council, clearly a non-profit, charges sales tax at the Scout Shop, I'll have to look into what the difference is.

A scouting unit is a subset of the CO, the CO enters into a legally binding agreement that makes that so.  A CO that tells a unit not to use their EIN for purchases is probably in violation of the chartering agreement, this means that BSA could revoke the charter based on those grounds.  Whether to do so or not is up to BSA, but the legal relationship between the CO and the unit remains that the unit is a subset of the CO irrespective of how the CO may view it.

In terms of paying or not paying sales tax for purchases for the unit, what Krampus' (and my) unit do is perfectly above board.  As a subset of the CO we are legally exempt from paying sales tax, there simply is no obligation under the law for the unit to pay that tax.  Whether a CO does or does not allow the unit to use their EIN is not something that needs to come to a resolution, either or both sides can simply choose to continue to operate and ignore the disagreement.  

Our unit operates much like Krampus': there are some local vendors, including the Scout Shop, where our CO's EIN is on file and we don't pay sales tax.  At other stores it just isn't worth the trouble to get the exemption.  If we are making a big purchase we might go to the trouble of filing paperwork, but if we purchase online and don't have to pay sales tax we know we're not legally obliged to do so and our conscience can be clear.

So now we have the boys "raising money" for their trips under the tax exempt status of a CO.  Is this a ministry when the CO only views the unit as someone who uses the facilities rent free or doesn't allow the unit access to the tax-exempt ID?

 

 

A lot of good advice so far, I would add two things.

1) There's no one who can make the CO do more than they want to do, if you want to reach out to someone in BSA to see if they have any help or advice track down your District Executive.  I wouldn't expect great things, but they may be able to point you to other Packs or COs in he even you do decide to leave.

2) Talk some more to the SM of the Troop that the CO charters, he may have some insight about how his relationship with the COR is maintained, and maybe some tips for how you can improve your relationship.

This kind of adult nonsense is almost always the biggest problem you face as a scout leader.  Do everything you can to keep it at the adult level and not let the boys become any sort of pawn in the squabble.

As @@fred johnson points out in another thread about Cub Scout training, BSA is going the opposite direction with their training; they're making it HARDER to track rather than making it easier to find, take, track and re-certify. National is not just missing the boat, they haven't even woken up yet.

The rest of the world is getting better and better at online/distance learning, and BSA is going in the other direction.  You have to work hard at that level of dysfunction.  Must be something in the water down there in DFW.

Note to hijack the thread, but has anyone experienced a troop getting ticked off with you for recruiting "their" pack members? For example, Troop 101010 has a Pack 101010. Most of the time the pack Webelos to to the troop, but more and more they are looking outside that troop and attending other troops' events. AFAIK those Webelos are fair game, no?

We heard a little grumbling a few years back when we picked up three boys from a Pack that had traditionally had its boys crossover to a different troop.  This was not a case where the Pack and Troop had the same CO.  My response was to smile and shrug.

Packs in our area are mostly affiliated with individual public grade schools, which end at 5th grade.  There are roughly four Troops in the area and they are chartered mainly by churches; the CO with the largest Troop in the area also has a Pack.  We're sponsored by a Catholic Church, we have a Pack and the parish also has a school.  The year of the grumbling we had been approached by the WDL who wanted his son in a Catholic affiliated troop.  That experience actually helped us realize that our practice of not recruiting outside our own Pack was not going to continue to work because our Pack was reliant on the school for new scouts and the school's enrollment was falling off (this was all 2008-9 and the recession).  We started more actively recruiting from other Packs, we did hear a little more grumbling the next year, but at this point it's just the way it is, and I think the increased competition has caused each Troop to step up its game a little bit.  At the same time our Pack has done more to recruit boys from outside the Parish school, which has in turn helped us keep our numbers up even though the percentage of boys who attend our parish school is still going down.

We crossed over 7 scouts from our Pack last night. We expect three more total from two different Packs over the next couple weeks.  Next year we may be bursting, a handful from our Pack and the bulk of a 12 member Webelos den from a public school Pack that is led by the mother of one of our scouts.  To tie it back to the original thread, we supply that den with two den chiefs and have had them camping with us.

Many councils are offering IOLS at summer camp with no fee.  You might check on yours.

My council does this, and you can spread it over more than one year if necessary, it took me two years and the testing out of a section through my District Training Chair to finally complete mine.

I'm not the biggest fan of BSA training, but there are orders of magnitude of difference between say IOLS and YPT.  You can complete YPT online, either Venturing or Boy Scout, in half an hour --- probably less time than any of us spend reading or posting on here in any given week.  And you can easily do it at the same time you're doing something useful like watching college basketball 

That's because the modules are mostly written in Java. You will need one of the iOS third party browsers that attempt to support Java.

 

BSA's tech dept is stuck in 2002.

Had a MBC call me the other night to walk her through redoing her YPT on line, after several attempts that kept crashing realized she was using Mozilla.  I'm not techie enough to know if that was actually the problem, but if it takes any special programming for BSA training to be compatible with other browsers than I know it's not happening.  Had her come to the next troop meeting and use my laptop.

We pay for basic leader training, for scouts and scouters; the costs for the courses are fairly minimal.  We pay half the cost of NYLT and Woodbadge.  We use some of the money we receive from our CO for this purpose rather than having the boys' or families' fundraising and fees pay for it.

The largest cost for adults is actually the time not the money.

In terms of IOLS specifically, I think they should move it into the unit to provide and certify the training.  It really is not very high skill level stuff if you have any outdoor experience at all, and even without outdoor experience for most adults there are some chunks of it that you know as well as anyone.  If we did it at the unit level it could work the way it works for the scouts: already have the skill then demonstrate it and you're signed off; for everything else: do it in blocks, over time, on campouts, as just an integrated part of your program.

 Bring extra rope, duct tape and ... aluminum foil.  And read everything they give you. 

The aluminum foil is the for the tinfoil hat everyone is wearing by the end.

Sorry, couldn't pass it up, a slow pitch softball with no arc.

I love my fellow Woodbadgers, but despite WB not because of it.

I appreciate all for their inputs. Not sure if my Council is participating in this program. It is a little hard being these people have been in Scouting each for up to 40 years plus. I am a little new to Scouting. Approximately 1 year and I have taken every training possible. I feel that to be an effective Trainer I Must have the knowledge to lead. Just a little info about me. I am a 9 year USAF Pararescueman. I was also a Leader in the American Naval Cadets for 8 years. So I am a believer in Lead, Follow, or Get out of the way. The BSA is pretty clear in what is expected. I was in the impression that these guidelines were to insure that the Scouts have a fun productive experience. This can only happen if all our leaders are trained. My goal and responsibility as a Trainer is to strive for excellence. 100 percent. I came into a troop that was restructuring from a SM that was not effective and training was not up to par. Have turned it around with 12 ASM and new Committee Members. Sometimes you can teach a new dog new tricks. I will figure out these issues. Will start with utilizing their backgrounds and incorporating this into a training program. I have the Backing of my Committees and Sm to do what is necessary to get this done. I t is just my goal. The tragedy in life is not reaching your goals. The tragedy lies in having no goals to reach. It is not a calamity not to reach the stars, but it is to have no stars to reach. For you see not failure but low aim is sin. Thanks again to all input an I will figure this out for the best of the Boys. Bubba

So Bubba Bubba, your enthusiasm is welcome, but here's some thoughts after reading your post and the responses.

First and foremost, institutional knowledge of an organization is critical information, and it will rarely be provided by the organization in any formalized way --- you need to go find it.  

You're not a little new to scouting, you're a babe in the woods in a century old organization, that's in no way a bad thing, but you need to recognize that fact when you are talking about setting goals or understanding what the organization does or even should want.  You say "The BSA is pretty clear in what is expected."  As you can see from the posts here BSA is absolutely not clear in what is expected and has backtracked and sidestepped on this issue over and over again.  You should probably step back a bit, set aside your notion of goals and instead strive to find the knowledge you first spoke of.  Ask a lot more questions, like you have here, before you assume you have the knowledge to set useful goals.  Is the lack of a credential really the same as untrained?  What is IOLS, why is it useful to help lead the scouts?  Is it even true that your ASMs never took it?  Why didn't they?  Other than being able to say "100%" why is the formal credential important now? What are the other ways that you can get this credential if it is important?  (Hint: they can test out, and if you're a trainer you may be the person who can "test" them, and that doesn't really need to be a formal test it can be an observation that after 40 years they actually do know T21 skills which is what IOLS is.

Goals setting can be useful, but it's not the only means to a better end, and no goal is on its own self justifying.  

I clicked on the Scouting Blog answer after my first post.  Like most BSA communications it treats us as if we were Tiger Cubs.  It restates that permission slips are recommended, but it doesn't give any reason why.  The answer "you should probably do this because we think it's a good idea" provides no actual guidance whatsoever.

I guess they do give some reason for them:Of course, our goal in all of this is to make sure that parents are aware of the kind of activities their youth will be participating in.

But I don't really find that credible as the reason for them.  We're adults, as capable and accomplished, or more so, than the people running the national organization.  Treat us that way and provide real, thoughtful, and accurate reasons for the things you think we should do on your and our own behalf.

Our Catholic Diocese' Youth Protection rules require them for overnight trips.  We have a Troop specific one that specifically lists the CO.

They don't provide much legal protection, if you're negligent and someone gets hurt because of it than you're going to be held liable for your negligence.

Fully agree.  Everything we do teaches our scouts lessons.  Being responsive to the scouts teaches a strong lesson about helping others and putting people before processes.  

people before processes.

 I think it's reasonable that, especially in a large troop,you have some predetermined time that SMCs or BORs happen because that makes everyone's, scouts' and scouters', lives a little easy because it's a little more predictable.  I don't think patience is the lesson being taught when, as in my troop, it used to be that you had to wait a week after you requested a SMC just because 'we want to teach scouts to schedule."  What schedule, we are all at least in theory scheduled to be at the meeting every week, that's not scheduling, that's controlling.  The same with the idea that we can only do BORs on the third Thursday because, well we only do them on third Thursdays.  that's not a lesson in patience that's a lesson in how to be bureaucratic.

Calico, 

My interpretation of the "black hole' was not a money sucking black hole but a "the money is gone and well spent" black hole where the CO had no further interest in the details.  

Does your CO want that kind of detailed inventory? We're chartered to a Catholic Church and have been for 50 years, neither the business manager for the parish, nor the pastor, not the financial advisory committee has any interest in anything like that kind of detail.  There is a diocesan rule that if we have a particular cash level in the bank for "a substantial period of time" we need to report that fact to the parish and they need to add that to their reports to the diocese.  But nobody really wants us complicating the books with that either. If we have a really good wreath sale we might approach that figure, but then we'll make some planned purchases a little early or subsidize a fun part of an outing and we're back to where everyone is comfortable.

What do the rest of you report to your COs?

The cash is especially vulnerable, probably no one would want anything else and the Fair Market Value is probably zero, if you have a trailer that might also be at risk.

Maybe find another CO, maybe especially one that already charters a troop and see if they'll take you on temporarily.  I would think that would be easier and quicker than being a "friends of."  Make sure your Council, not just the DE but someone like the SE and a Board Member know what's going on.  They have a vested interest in keeping units whole.

One interim solution might be to park your cash with the council.  In our council most troops have an account at the scout shop that has money in it that can then be used to pay council bills, not just awards but also camping fees for weekends, summer camp etc.  You could probably prepay some summer camp fees, maybe even prepay some rechartering.  We have a limit from the diocese as to how much cash we are allowed to have on hand for an extended period of time and we have looked at doing things like this but never actually had to.

I do SMCs as needed.  When I first became SM we had a formal "you have to ask a week in advance" policy for them.  After I had to cancel two because things came up for me I ended that formality and I'll do them when asked, sometimes the same night sometimes the next week or on a campout.  I know the scouts and the scouts know me, I don't see any reason to put it off for formality's sake.  Our Advancement Chair schedules BORs, usually the meeting following being asked, but they can also happen the same evening.  These things aren't disseration defenses they're conversations between a scout and the adults they associate with.

EBORs are worked out between the scout and the District Advancement Chair, basically they are an accommodation of everybody's schedule.  

For your situation I would say reasonable people should act reasonably.  If the responsibility for scheduling the EBOR fell to the CC and he didn't act for a few weeks than I would think he could bend a little on his scheduling.  A Lacrosse tryout, and certainly confirmation classes are reasonable things to be worked around.  Maybe the EBOR is held on the meeting night but later rather than earlier, maybe pick a mutually agreeable different night.  I will say that time to adults and time to teenagers can feel very differently.  To a 50 year old a couple weeks later means nothing, to a 15 year old that can seem interminable.  Adults are volunteers and their sacrifice needs to be recognized, but adults claim to be the serbant leaders of the kids and should give due deference to their point of view as well.

So, I'm still not sure what you're really asking about.

Regarding assets, here's how it works.  Let's say you want to buy a handful of tents.  Whether you get the money for them from a direct check from your CO, or a donation of money from someone else, or a levy of dues on your families, or a bake sale or other fund raiser, the CO probably doesn't want and there's no legal reason why they would need, to get involved with  that decision.  Your Troop Committee and your PLC work together to decide what to buy, where to get the money, etc.  Then you buy the tents.  There is no need for there to exist any kind of formal inventory report about these tents, there's no balance sheet they need to be included on, no tracking of depreciation, nothing like what you might need if you were a for profit business.  As a legal matter the CO owns the tents, they don't have to make any formal acknowledgement of this, it is simply a fact.  That means that they can dispose of them if they want to, they can tell you to share them with other organizations if they want to, or they can simply not care at all about whether you bought some tents that now formally are their belongings if they want to.  There are some caveats about what happens if they close the unit, but they don't matter here.  The most likely thing is that they don't care; they selected the COR who selects the CC, who selects the committee, and they trust you to do what you think is best.  They don't have to take any other action or paperwork or anything.

Next you mention money.  You probably have or want a checking account, but it's at least conceivable that you could operate all cash.  the checking account can say Troop XX as the named owner, but the Tax ID necessary to open and maintain it is your CO's tax ID, if you earn any interest on the account and receive a 1099 you should give that to the CO Treasurer, but it's likely that if you earn any at all it is so diminis an amount that it really doesn't matter whether they track it or not.  The CO does not need (they can if they want) to know what else happens inside that account.  Like the tents they are the owner of that money, they don't need to acknowledge that, it is simply a fact.  Like the tents they can tell you what to do with the money or they can decide to delegate all that decision making to you and not give it another thought.  

A trailer pretty much works the same way as tents and money, the CO can care a little, a lot, or not at all about what you do.

As to popcorn money, at least in our council you order it and receive a bill for it which you pay to the council out of what you collect in sales.  The council doesn't send money back to the units they just let you keep whatever the profit is after you pay them.  Your council may work differently.

I feel that you have more specific questions or concerns, if you provide more detail about what's happening or what your specific problem is lots of folks here have some experience they can share to help you.

Seldon, 

Is your concern academic or is there a specific action you want the CO to take?

What kind of organization is your CO?

What do you mean take ownership of the unit's assets?  Do you want them to keep some sort of balance sheet reflecting the depreciation of the inventory of your tents?  

What do you mean by report income and expenses to the IRS?  If for instance your CO is a religious organization they probably don't have to report much if anything about income and expenses to the IRS.  For non Church COs it's a little more complicated, but unless you're bringing in a lot more income to the troop than your spending there probably isn't anything about the troop's finances that the CO needs to report.

I suspect your looking for some complicated reporting regimen that just isn't necessary.

From the Archbishop's letter: "Organizations that GSUSA promotes and partners with are conflict with Catholic values, such as Amnesty International, Coalition for Adolescent Girls, OxFam and more."  

It certainly possible to disagree with some of the actions or policies of those organizations, no  organization, including my Catholic Church, is perfect. But it seems pretty extreme and dubious to claim that those three organizations conflict with Catholic values.  There is certainly no church-wide prohibition of supporting or working with those organizations.