GCASA has lower overhead and fringe benefit costs that other agencies in Western New York.

Dopkins and Company, an accounting firm in Buffalo, NY, has done a CFR (Consolidated Fiscal Report) benchmarking report of state funded not-for-profit agencies in Western, NY for the 2007 - 2008 fiscal year.

Out of a potential pool of 350 not-for-profit agencies, 72 agencies agreed to participate in the study, GCASA being one.

There are some interesting findings which I want to report to our taxpayers who wonder whether they are getting their money's worth in supporting GCASA's mission and services.

I will be writing a series of reports because the data can be overwhelming if it is presented all at once.

In this second article on the benchmarking which Dopkins and Company did on agency performance based on the CFRs it was found that GCASA's overhead was at 11.97% as compared to 12.44% for other agencies with budgets under $10,000,000.00.

Further the total agency fringe benefits as a percentage of total salaries is 21.53% as compared to 25% for other not-for-profits in the region and as compared to 23.43% for agencies with budgets under $10,000,000.00 and 27.73% for agencies with budgets over $20,000.000.00.

The conclusions from this data is that GCASA is extremely well run when it come to managing its overhead and its fringe benefits. This of course is good for the taxpayors and funders and not so good for its employees who could get a better fringe benefit package working for other agencies.

This data dispells the myth expressed in comments to the Daily News that GCASA's staff are getting rich, very well paid, and pampered burdens to the taxpayers. In fact the opposite is the truth when one looks at the actual data. GCASA is extremely frugal, well run, and employees are involved more in a labor of love than one of personal enrichment and aggrandisement.

The executive director and other GCASA managers continue to advocate to policy makers and funders for the GCASA staff which is very hard working and achieves excellent results and yet continues to be relatively poorly compensated and provided for.

This is article #2 in a series on the not-for-profit benchmarking report.