New York Not For Profit Law - Compensation

"Hypothetical scenario: a 501c3 corporation formed to support a college wants to supplement the compensation of the president of the school which it supports. clearly this runs afoul of the prohibition on distributions for private benefit, but the reason for wanting to make the payment is in line with the corp's purpose, in that better compensation brings in better talent which benefits the school. is there a way for the NP corp to make this payment w/o endangering its status or bringing the wrath of the attorney general?"

You have posed an interesting question, which also involves a bit of a sticky situation. Here are my thoughts on this. I have seen individual donors be able to accomplish this. For example, many schools augument the salaries of their big name coaches this way to keep up the quality of their athletic programs. With all that is at stake here, however, I truly think that the only prudent step is to run this idea by a New York lawyer -- there are quite a few who hold a CPA in addition to their JD, so that would probably be ideal. If you go to the WLD main page you could easily get some referrals. That is where I would start -- to avoid raising the suspicions of the AG it would be money very well spent to at least confer with legal counsel. AJJ