Getty to display finances

AFTER a year of playing defense over allegations of murky management practices, the J. Paul Getty Trust is taking a symbolic step toward transparency: Before the month is out, officials say, the Getty website (www.getty.edu) will add a hefty helping of internal facts and figures, including salaries of the trust’s best-paid officials.

None of this information is a state secret -- in fact, most of it, including the top five salaries, is included in the public disclosure form that the organization must file to hold on to its nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service.

But the move will put the Getty among a minority of nonprofit organizations that make such information so readily accessible. (The New York-based Ford Foundation and San Francisco-based James Irvine Foundation are two others.)

“We have some reputation rebuilding to do, and one way to do it is to be open and transparent,” Getty spokesman Ron Hartwig said. “This grew out of the reforms that were passed by the board of trustees at the April meeting.”

Though websites such as Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org) and GuideStar (www.guidestar.org) make it relatively easy for an outsider to look at a nonprofit’s IRS paperwork via the Internet, several arts communications specialists said they knew of no major cultural institution in Los Angeles that posted its own disclosure information.

Now that the Getty is doing so, “it will definitely come up” elsewhere, said one insider at another Los Angeles museum. In fact, said another insider at yet another local museum, “I’m going to bring that up. We should do that.”

Over the last year, the Getty Trust and its museum subsidiary have been battered by controversies over executive spending habits, governance practices and the museum’s antiquities acquisition policies. Getty Trust President Barry Munitz resigned abruptly in February, and a probe of Getty financial practices by the state attorney general is pending.

Getty officials say the information will go up under the heading “governance.” Along with most or all of the $9.6-billion organization’s most recent IRS disclosure (which fills 160 pages), Getty communications staffers say, they will include brief biographies of trustees and senior staff. They will also include the trust’s bylaws, along with its “indenture” -- the legal document by which the trust was formed -- and institutional policies on such matters as employee whistle-blowing.

As for salaries, Hartwig said, “we may go further” than the top five officials whose pay is disclosed on an IRS 990 form. “We may include information about relevant people who would not necessarily have been included on the previous year’s 990.”

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Christopher Reynolds