Happy Monday,
We occasionally receive gifts of securities without any donor information attached. In most cases, we can get back in touch with the donor's broker and get the necessary information. However, there are still occasions when the broker refuses to give us the personal information, even if there is no requirement for donor anonymity; I guess they feel that's not their information to share.
In the past, we have just booked those gifts to an anonymous account in the CRM and moved on. However, our General Counsel has advised us that we can no longer accept these gifts without knowing who the actual donor is, regardless of the size of the gift. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that our own brokerage is under instruction from our investment management folks to liquidate any securities under $XX. Thus we can't just send the shares back since they have been converted into cash by the time the info gets to us.
Has anyone encountered a similar problem and how have you dealt with it? We are unlikely to get any changes at the level of our own broker not liquidating the shares given the overall volume they handle and the lack of details. I don't want to place any sort of process at the front end that might impede our donors from getting their gifts in, plus we aren't staffed to handle some sort of "approval" process for receiving securities gifts. Thus my conundrum. Thank you!
-jsg
------------------------------
Josh Greenbaum
Emory University
jgree2@emory.edu------------------------------