PeterHopkins

I think a blanket ban on shirtless Scouts would be too draconian. As has been mentioned above, do we really need to tell a 16-year-old summer camp staffer that he cannot remove his shirt while laboring on a hot day? I've never been involved with Mic-O-Say or similar non-OA honor societies. However, the little I know f Mic-O-Say indicates it is substantially adult led. Having ceremonies in which the Scout is required (or at least expected) to be shirtless is tantamount to the adults directing the Scout to remove his shirt. Unlike aquatics activities, I don't se how having such a thing impr

Mic O Say participants are Scouts and Scouters, and the activities take place in a Scout camp. In the current bankruptcy, there is discussion of how to define a Scouting activity. It's hard for me to imagine how a Mic O Say event could fall outside that definition. The council has a Mic O Say page on its website. That's beyond tacit approval; it's an endorsement. The BSA would never be able to convince a court that Mic O Say activities are outside the realm of Scouting.

I've been to BSA camps that require females wear one-piece swimsuits.

This a a good opportunity for someone to start a niche business. I wonder what the downside would be if they get it wrong. Suppose they give the nod to an individual who later becomes an abuser?

Insurance companies also make terrific use of their capital. The longer the delay, the more their capital will grow. They want to pay claims as late as possible. Even paying out somewhat more at a later date is a better deal for them than paying out earlier.

@SiouxRanger- As someone who has provided tax and financial advice to attorneys who regularly work on a contingency-fee basis, I can say that many find it difficult to strike a balance between enjoying the fruits of their success and building a war chest for the next case. Those who can master delayed gratification end up with the most successful careers, because they can take on bigger, more complex cases an hold out to get better settlements. I've seen such attorneys get sucked into cases that they underestimated and were unable to bankroll. It's not a pretty sight. It's worse when they

It was the mid-1960s.

While that is what is being said, I suspect the true obective is to have finality regarding everythig with respect to both National and the local councils. They never want to deal with the past again.

No, but the amount of bankruptcy work I've done in Delaware (and New York) is insufficient to draw a conclusion from that.

I work as a tax planner and consultant in Delaware. There are lots of reasons entities are formed in or redomesticate to Delaware. One of them would be the efficiency of the bankruptcy court here. It is adept at handling large, complex cases. More than 2/3 of Furtune 500 companies are Delaware entities. The expectation of having a specific judge assigned to a bankruptcy case is not a reason to redomesticate to Delaware, and Kosnoff is smart enough to know that.

I did say that I agree with your point. If this is the primary means of communicationing with the national Cub Scouting director, then we ought to see something on the BSA website that tells us so, I wasn't trying to prove or disprove your point. I would say that you simply made it more strongly than is merited. I don't know whether there is the same level of engagement in Scouts BSA, Venturing or Sea Scouting as there is in Cub Scouting. That coulld be because there isn't such engagement, or because I am currently serving as a Cubmaster and not focused on the other programs. Members

My pack is chartered to a Catholic church. The diocese requires a certain number of adults (based on the number of youth participants) to have separate background checks. They don't care that the BSA does background checks as well. So, some, but not all of our registered leaders have these additional background checks, and the pack has ot pay for them.

I agree with that statement completely. That being said, it was a great program and should have been utilized more than it was. I often thought it would work well in all-boys' high schools, particularly boarding schools.

Your point is well taken. However, the National Director of Cub Scouting, Anthony Berger, is highly engaged with the masses. He follows the Cub Scout Volunteers group on Facebook and appears on Cub Chat Live on modt Fridays. He is often joined by Lisa Wylie, the chair of the Cub Scouting subcommittee. Anthony engaged directly with me in comments on Facebook. I sent him a friend request, and he accepted. When I saw something a local council was doing that I thought to be particularly toxix, I sent him a private message, and he responded. Yes, it would be ideal if one could look up the

The Scouter's Training Award for Roundtable (and Huddle) staff members was eliminated in 2011, when those staff members became assistant roundtable commissioners. They now may earn the Arrowhead Honor.

I was speaking in general terms. If he does get invited into the mediation room, he owes it to his clients to do the best he can for them. I truly don't believe his tweets help his clients, and I also believe they hurt the Scouting Movement, something larger than the BSA. All they do is shine the spotlight on him.

A few random thoughts... I wonder how the salary paid to James E. West, adjusted for inflation, compares to the salaries paid to recent CSEs. I don't have the data. I read at one time that the average National League player earned roughly seven times the average American worker in 1876, and the averahe Major League playe earned roughly seven times the average American worker in 1976. When free agency came into being, the multiple imediatel shot to 70 times the average American worker. Who knows what it is now. The point is that many things in our society have changed drastically sinc

@CynicalScouter - SOX fundamentally changed many elements of financial reporting by public companes, how such companies act and how their financial statements are audited. In some cases, the costs to become compliant were tremendous, and it was difficult for me, as a CPA, to see how the public gained a beenfit from some of the provisions. I think the net was a little wider than it needed to be. That being said, I don't think sections 802 or 1102 have had much impact on the behavior of people. I doubt anyone in the BSA now would engage in such acts now, even if they were completely unaware

@CynicalScouter - Yes, I agree those two sections would apply to the BSA (or any person) engaging in those criminal acts. As I said in my comment, a non-public entity generally needs to commit a crime for Sarbanes-Oxley to apply. There is an in-between area in which something fails to rise to the level of a crime but may not be completely accurate. The financial data provided by the BSA to the Bankruptcy Court should result from a good faith effort that reflects ordinary business care and prudence. That will generally not lead to perfection. Was your comment implying that prior to SOX, su

Very little of the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act apply to the BSA, since it is not a public company. In the non-public entity context, SOX generally applies to criminal acts and not much more than that. The IRS expects that if a return preparer "takes a position" on a return in an area in which the law is unclear, the preparer must conclude that the position would have at least a 40% chance of surviving, if it were audited. Of course, fraudulent reporting would have a 0% chance of surviving an audit.

As you say, accounting is an art, not a science. Taxation, as a discipline, is a science that is often invaded by the art of accounting. Management's judgement plays a role in producing accounting figures. For instance, if a bakery buys a new delivery trck, management must estimate how many years the truck will be used, what its salvage value will be and the rate at which the truck's value or usefulness will decline. All these factors will drive how much depreciation expense the bakery recognizes in its financial statements for the truck. The only thing that accounting rules require in co

All expenses are categorized on Form 990 into one of three categories: (1)Program, (2) Management and General, and (3) Fundraising. Program expenses are costs associated with the organization's efforts to serve its constituents and accomplish its purpose(s). A clear and obvious example would be the salary paid to a summer camp staffer. Fundraising expenses are costs incurred in connection with soliciting donations. One of these would be the printing and mailing costs for requests to sponsor a Scout at summer camp. Another would be the costs to produce special Friends of Scouting CSPs

No, they didn't. That was handled by our COR, a Catholic priest who was later named by multiple victims in multiple parishes as a sexual abuse perpetrator. As Scouts, we all appreciated the program opportnities the men made available to us. We were also well aware that they enjoyed the social aspect of weekend camping. A Scout in 1978 saw that in a completely dofferent way from how one would see it in 2021. That doesn't make it right, but it was not harmful to us. Had there ever been an emergency requiring adult intervention, that might have been a different story.

So, I went back and corrected it. Thanks for the heads up. I recall as a Scout, the adults in my Brooklyn troop would frequently use the words ute or utes in conversation when referring to us. If a matter requiring decision arose, one of them might say, "We should let the utes decide." We actually called them "the men", and they used that term too. I remember one noticing we were getting too close to some prepared food yelling, "That food is for the men, not for the ute members." They would say, "Everything we do is for the utes," as they settled down for their alcohol-fueled Saturda

From experience, I can say that parents abusing their children is different from the other situations you mention. When the abuse and neglect span an entire childhood, the child first has to reach an age where s/he as another reference point. Until then, the child sees the abuse as a normal part of growing up. By then, the chilkd has been conditioned to believe s/he is the cause of the abuse. It is difficult, maybe impossible, to break free of that. I didn't even start trying until I was 41.