Non-Governmental & Not-For-Profit Organizations

Non-Governmental & Not-For-Profit Organizations
The final version of the Russian Legislation on Non-Governmental Organizations has been modified to limit activities of foreign NGOs (while the earlier version spoke of them only obliquely). The amendment added manjy provisions that apply only to foreign NGOs, including requiring reporting of funds brought into Russia, and special registration provisions.

The bill has been improved since its original draft, which mandated that foreign NGO's operating as just "representative offices" had to re-register as Russian NGO's (effectively meaning that no foreign NGO's could operate in Russia). The Committee is now focusing on how to contribute to the drafting of the regulations that would be used to implement the law, which is extremely general and needs a lot of fleshing out in the so-called "normative acts". These are like the U.S. Treasury Regulations that expand on the actual implementation of the IRS Code section 501(c)(3) and other statutes ruling tax-exempt nonprofits in the US. We are forming a sub-committee that can follow this issue closely.