Dystrophy Group Stonewalls Columnist   

When Dianne Piastro, a Long Beach, California-based columnist, asked the Muscular Dystrophy Association last August for financial information for a story on the organization, she apparently called at a bad time.

Although U.S. law requires nonprofits to make their Internal Revenue Service 990 tax form available to the public, officials at the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) offices in Long Beach said first that the 990 was "in storage" and later that it would not be available until after the organization's annual Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon.

Piastro, who uses a wheelchair as a result of advancing multiple sclerosis, began writing her column, "Living with a Disability," for the Long Beach Press-Telegram in 1986. Distributed to 650 newspapers through the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), a wire service operated by Scripps-Howard, and, by special arrangement, to a dozen other large papers, it has won numerous awards and generated thousands of letters.

When officials at MDA headquarters in Tucson didn't return Piastro's calls, Piastro wrote about the MDA's stonewalling in her five-part series on the organization. Since some state governments also require copies of the 990s from nonprofits, Piastro contacted the Registry of Charitable Trusts in California. Officials there discovered that the forms were on file but – for the second year in a row – without attachments listing the organization's top salaries. After the telethon, Piastro eventually did get the information from the attorney general in Illinois, where complete MDA information was on file.

Later, MDA officials apologized to state agencies for what they called the "inconvenience." Gerald C. Weinberg, the MDA's director of field organization, explains that the week before the telethon was the organization's busiest time of year. And while the salary data was "inadvertently omitted" from the California and other state forms, he says, it was included in the New York and IRS filings. Overall, Weinberg concludes, the organization met its public inspection obligations "with a couple of minor boo-boos."

In her column Piastro criticized the MDA, maintaining that more than half of the $109.7 million the group raised from public donations in 1990 went to fund raising and employee salaries and benefits.

Weinberg adamantly disputes Piastro's figures. "She doesn't know what she's talking about," he says. "She doesn't know how to read financial statements."

The Council of Better Business Bureaus, which reports on financial activities of charities, says the MDA meets CBBB standards for charitable solicitations.

As for reaction to Piastro's series, the NEA says it has no figures on which papers published which columns. MDA officials say 30 papers ran the first column but only six carried the last, which included the 990 figures, in mid-September.

Piastro's own paper wasn't one of them. Managing Editor Rich Archbold says the column didn't meet the paper's standards, particularly without an MDA response.

Piastro says her calls to MDA national headquarters were not returned. At Archbold's request, she sent a certified letter to Robert Linder, MDA's national finance director. He replied, "In light of the obvious bias that so extensively characterizes your apparent ongoing assault upon MDA, I believe it would be decidedly counterproductive to the interests of those served by the association to participate in any interview with you." The paragraph was inserted in Piastro's column when it appeared in the Press-Telegram , two weeks late.

MDA officials say the series greatly damaged their fund raising, causing "droves of people" to call and write to say they would not contribute or honor their pledges. The 990 column, Weinberg says, "was especially hurtful."

MDA officials acknowledge that they refused repeated requests from Piastro for interviews based on the first four columns of her series. Piastro got no cooperation from the MDA, Weinberg says, because she was "nasty" and "didn't deserve any."

Piastro says she is used to running into barriers. "I have become very resourceful in finding out how you can get around the barrier, or do away with it...This is an organization that purports to help disabled people and get people to donate money. They're not really helping anyone when they don't disclose their finances. Maybe my suspicion was heightened because I am disabled."