I recently looked into the Rust Foundation’s 2023 IRS Form 990, and something caught my attention:
- The Executive Director was paid £261,151 GBP (~$332,445 USD).
- The Head of Finance & Funding received £113,977 GBP ($145,092 USD) + £10,362 GBP ($13,190 USD) in retirement benefits.
- These salaries weren’t paid directly by the Rust Foundation (a US nonprofit) but instead routed through a UK-based entity, Rust Inc Limited, which is labeled as a “foreign subsidiary.”
Questions I Have:
Why is a nonprofit paying six-figure salaries through foreign subsidiaries instead of directly?
Is this common among tech nonprofits, or is Rust Foundation’s approach unusual?
--
I’m not accusing them of wrongdoing, but does this raises ̶s̶e̶r̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ some questions about nonprofit governance, transparency?
If anyone has insight into why this structure exists or how other open-source foundations handle executive pay, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Both of those officers appear to be located in the UK. It is common to pay people located in a different place than the company HQ using a local entity. Whether this is mandatory or merely advantageous for tax or bureaucratic reasons depends on the situation.
Excellent answer. I'd like to add that this is common enough that there are about 50 service providers that do it.
If you're Carlsberg and have one single salesperson in a country, these companies let you have a regular employment contact without your own subsidiary. Or you're the UN. Or...
Your addition pretty much does explain. Thank you.
Foundation's 990 (page 8) initially mentions paying 0 for full time work, only later to be explained in supplemental information page that there were in fact paid well high enough.
This could be simply payment structure like you said but their overal financial summary doesn't explain weather this was included in thecost of admin or not.
Page 7 of Form 990 asks for "highest paid employee." including other info where Rust foundation has reported 0 for most people.
Wording, I could have written "some" question, not serious.
It raises questions about transparency, and why a U.S. nonprofit is routing executive salaries through a foreign subsidiary instead of paying them directly.
Surely there has to be better ways of “vendoring” (including hosting your own package repository that doesn’t automatically pull new versions) than adding thousands or maybe tens of thousands of files to the git repo?
This is an option but that makes it easier to conceal malicious code within node_modules as an internal threat actor or make super sure there's a culture of actually reviewing those changes.
In cases like that it helps to do npm install on the CI and make sure you end up with identical code. Decent trade-off.
this is an area that is top of mind for me right now. you don't have to vendor your deps to get a detailed report of what changed, and bonus, how your app calls into it. just wrote about it: https://edgebit.io/blog/code-diff-reachability/
I emigrated to work here in Norway in a startup about three years ago. The stock company grants me, unrelaised is already tax as wealth at 1.1% though I have not seen a single penny of that unlisted stock - cant sell it eitehr.
Now, If I decide to move - I will have huge tax bill due to this change.
Youtubers regularly swap the video thumbnail + title. Youtube even has tools to A/B test various thumbnails + titles nowadays for different users.
I can confirm that the title "I Hacked My Friend's Phone to Show How Easy It Is" was the actual title when the video was uploaded. However you're right that it now looks like it changed to "Exposing The Flaw In Our Phone System" a day later.
Why is a nonprofit paying six-figure salaries through foreign subsidiaries instead of directly?
Is this common among tech nonprofits, or is Rust Foundation’s approach unusual?
--
I’m not accusing them of wrongdoing, but does this raises ̶s̶e̶r̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ some questions about nonprofit governance, transparency?
If anyone has insight into why this structure exists or how other open-source foundations handle executive pay, I’d love to hear your thoughts!