Dr. Ali Krisht is again the highest-paid employee of a nonprofit organization in Arkansas — and he got a raise.
Krisht, a neurosurgeon who heads the Arkansas Neuroscience Institute at CHI St. Vincent infirmary, received total compensation of $2.4 million in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2013, the most recent data available from Guidestar.org.
Krisht’s salary in fiscal 2013 was $2.36 million, more than double the salary reported by St. Vincent the previous year.
Research for this third annual list of the highest-paid nonprofit employees turned up 15 with total compensation in the seven figures, up from seven on last year’s list. Most of the new names in the million-plus club are doctors who worked directly for Central Arkansas Radiation Therapy Institute Inc. in the fiscal year that ended in mid-2013.
Alison Melson, spokeswoman for CARTI, said the cancer treatment clinic had not directly employed physicians until its acquisition of Little Rock Hematology & Oncology in December 2011 and Hematology Oncology Services of Arkansas in January 2013.
All 15 nonprofit employees with compensation of $1 million or more are medical doctors, with the exception of B. Kim Day. Day, No. 8 on the list, is an executive with the Mercy hospital system of Chesterfield, Missouri, who is included on the list because he spent part of the 2013 fiscal year running Mercy’s hospital in Hot Springs before it was acquired by CHI St. Vincent in April 2013.
In fact, the top 22 nonprofit employees come from the health care field. The most highly paid nonprofit employee who does not work in the health care industry is Nicholas Brown, No. 23, president and CEO of Southwest Power Pool of Little Rock. The regional electricity transmission organization paid Brown $877,935 in 2013. He was one of 19 SPP employees paid at least $200,000 that year.
Get the List: An expanded list of 309 names, including those with salaries of $200,000 or more, is available for purchase in spreadsheet form or PDF.
List Methodology
Nonprofit organizations — essentially businesses with no shareholders that are engaged in a mission for the public benefit — are exempt from federal income taxes. In exchange for that advantage, the organizations are required to file annual financial reports with the Internal Revenue Service.
Such a report is known as an IRS Form 990, although there are variations in the form depending on the nonprofits’ total revenue and purpose. Unlike individual income tax returns, the 990s are public documents.
The 990s include revenue, expenditures, assets, investments and, most important for this week’s list, compensation paid to directors, trustees, officers and key employees. They must include the compensation of the five highest-paid employees who are paid more than $100,000 a year.
Compensation for nonprofit employees is gently regulated by the IRS, which requires only that nonprofits pay executives “fair and reasonable compensation,” according to a 2011 white paper by GuideStar, a nonprofit organization that compiles nonprofit financial reports and makes them available online.
Arkansas Business has long reported publicly available salary information — in lists of the highest-paid state employees, executive officers and directors of publicly traded companies headquartered in Arkansas, electric and gas utilities, public school superintendents, nonprofit hospitals and the largest nonprofit organizations.
The 990s used in this week’s list were the most recent available from GuideStar’s website.
The fiscal years researched ended between May 31, 2013, and Dec. 31, 2014, and are noted in each entry on the list. Because the data is between 6 and 25 months old, some of the individuals may no longer be employed by the nonprofit listed or may not have the same title. When Arkansas Business was aware of a change or departure, it was noted.
GuideStar’s database includes almost 14,000 nonprofits in Arkansas. Almost 9,000 of those had annual revenue of less than $100,000 and were not included in Arkansas Business’ research. The 990s of more than 100 nonprofits were researched, including all that had annual revenue of $2 million. With the deliberate exception of electric cooperative executives whose salaries have long been reported in the utility lists, we believe we have captured most of the nonprofit employees who received compensation packages of $240,000 or more during those recent fiscal years, but some smaller organizations paying relatively large salaries may have been overlooked. (Omissions or errors should be reported to Editor Gwen Moritz at GMoritz@ABPG.com.)
The list is ranked by total compensation, which then is broken out into salary and “other compensation.”
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