Since becoming New to Las Vegas a decade ago, I’ve taken an annual look at the Injured Police Officers Fund. That’s the home-grown 44-year-old Las Vegas fallen-cop tax-exempt nonprofit that raises and provides money to families of Southern Nevada cops injured or killed in the line of the duty. Especially when there is a police fatality, the Las Vegas news media often identifies IPOF as the official conduit for designated donations from public-spirited residents to grieving families.

To me, a national journalist who has written about charities and fundraising for decades, IPOF has stood out in sharp contrast to the morass of national faux charity political action committees sporting law enforcement names with shadowy non-police managers who essentially pocketed all the donations from cold-calling clueless donors. These outfits trolled incessantly for donor cash but spent virtually no money raised on their stated missions. You can read about many of them on this blog by clicking here or typing “faux charity” into the nearby search box. I think IPOF occupies a higher ground in this swamp, and overall does decent work, partly because it is cop-run on a volunteer basis, and not very pushy in its fundraising.

But although a million-dollar annual enterprise operating in the public interest, IPOF simply has not lived up to the promise of its relatively new president, Alexander Cuevas, a North Las Vegas police officer, to continue expanding transparency on how it functions. A recent IPOF move to shield its financial disclosures to the Nevada public, its hard-to-find most recent federal tax return, for 2024, and the organization’s own website raise some uncomfortable questions that the charity so far has declined to address in the seven weeks since I first started propounded them, despite gentle follow-up requests.

So I’ll detail my issues here.

♦On December 20, IPOF submitted a form to the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office for the first time declaring itself exempt from filing an annual Nevada Charitable Solicitation Registration Statement. The CSRS, which is posted online, provides some financial information to would-be donors in Nevada and is required by law before soliciting contributions. But here was the statutory exemption IPOF claimed: “Request for contributions, donations, gifts or the like is directed only to persons who are related within the third degree of consanguinity to the officers, directors, trustees or executive personnel of the organization.” As I recently wrote Cuevas, “How is this even possible with the IPOF, since after officer fatalities IPOF issues general pleas for donations through news and social media to the Southern Nevada public at large? ‘Third degree of consanguinity’ refers specifically to: parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great aunts, great uncles, great-grandparents, children, grandchildren, great grandparents, and first cousins. I would think IPOF requests for donations reach thousands of individuals who are beyond the third degree of consanguinity of anyone connected with IPOF.”

I have not heard back.

♦”The IPOF is governed by sworn law enforcement officers representing each member agency … Each agency appoints a primary and alternate representative,” IPOF’s website says right now, while indicating that totals about a dozen law enforcement agencies, the largest of which by far is Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. But despite this stated one-for-all-and-all-for-one philosophy, the IPOF web site page entitled “The Board” currently lists just four names, although it seems two aren’t board members. IPOF’s corporate registration with the State of Nevada right now lists no more than five officers and directors. Even worse, IPOF’s latest federal tax return–filed under penalty of perjury–actually listed NO board members by name as of December 31, 2024. IPOF did not check any boxes next to names in the required column for current directors. By law (and even common sense), there has to be at least one board member, and under IRS 990 rules all board members at year’s end have to be disclosed and identified as such on the tax return. This may be a mere tax-return-preparation error (despite the $13,975 IPOF spent on accounting.) But in my view that’s a material omission that might well force IPOF to file an amended tax return for the second straight year. (Below, I’ll discuss the reason for that first amended return.)

I have not heard back.

♦By adding numbers from various schedules on the 2024 tax return, it appears that IPOF received $981,000 in donated private support, plus another $415,000 in investment returns, mainly from its $3 million endowment, for total revenue of $1.4 million. But it was not at all clear how much money went to “provide monetary assistance” to affected families, which IPOF states on its web site to be its mission. That sum might have been $495,000 in cash grants to 17 unidentified families, the sum of several different schedules on the tax return, or something more or less, due to covering of other costs or double-counting. According to the IPOF website, no officers were killed in the line of duty during 2024, which tends to bump up the numbers.

But there also was a large listed expense of $247,722 mysteriously described without detail as “donations to various organizations.” Which ones? For what? The tax return didn’t say. IRS rules require disclosure of the name and amount of any organization receiving $5,000 or more from a nonprofit. With none listed, and assuming the stated numbers are accurate, and no one got more than $5,000, simple math would suggest that has to be at least nearly 50 donees.

The last time I know of that IPOF disclosed organizational donations was in a 2018 press release–not a under-oath tax return. That press release listed $1 million given to 27 “deserving first responder organizations” in southern Nevada. Among them: North Las Vegas Police Department Honor Guard, Henderson Police Department Honor Guard, City of Las Vegas Honor Guard, Boulder City Police Department Honor Guard, Mesquite Police Department Honor Guard, Clark County Park Police Honor Guard, and Friends of Las Vegas Metro Police Department Honor Guard. As I wrote that year, “Honor guards are certainly not families of fallen officers. But how are they even first responders?” In November, I asked Cuevas for a list of the 2024 donations and the amounts.

I have not heard back.

♦By law the IRS Form 990 is a public record that can be obtained by anyone who knows how. For a decade IPOF annually has graciously emailed me a copy upon my request. Charity watchdogs and the IRS encourage nonprofits to post their 990s on their websites as best practices to improve access and accountability. I have been hectoring IPOF for years to improve its transparency. Responding to my request for the 2024 990, Cuevas emailed me on September 7, 2025, that he would provide it to me when it was filed with the feds (which he did, in November), and also that it would be posted on the IPOF’s website “to increase transparency.”

Well, as of this writing, not yet.

For the previous calendar year of 2023, IPOF had to file an amended 990 tax return after I pointed out it was not disclosing the amount of designated donations and expenditures–money given by donors specifically earmarked for a specific fallen officer, often as a result of news media coverage. This is often a big sum, topping all other largess. IPOF disclosed this amount for the first time for 2022 after its previous president, Lt. Chelsea Stuenkel of the Nevada Department of Public Safety, agreed with me that IRS rules mandated it, but then somehow omitted the sum in the original return for 2023.

How big a sum for 2024? Based on the format IPOF used in disclosing numbers in that amended 2023 return, designated donations accounted for $420,000 of the $495,000 that might have been distributed directly to families.

Founded in 1982, IPOF started in response to uninsured expenses incurred by a policeman shot in the head during a traffic stop, and over time has grown. As has been explained to me in the past, IPOF pays a death benefit of $25,000 for line-of-duty deaths and, in non-fatal cases, up to $10,000 of out-of-pocket costs like child care during a recovery period. The charity’s role in funneling designated contributions without taking a haircut for overhead that might be its most enduring function.

Here is how I evaluate IPOF’s financial efficiencies numbers for 2024 (data for 2025 likely won’t become available until next fall), as drawn from the 37-page tax return and applying standard metrics used nationally in charitable assessment.

One such tool is the the fundraising efficiency ratio. This is the percent of donations remaining after deduction of fundraising expenses. For 2024, IPOF’s ratio was 100%. In other words, the charity spent nothing on fundraising; it can’t get any more efficient than that. The Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance, a leading national charity watchdog.BBB says any ratio above 65% is okay.

There is a big reason for this super-efficiency. IPOF doesn’t hire outside direct mail or telephone solicitation outfits, a process that is expensive and, at least in the case of law-enforcement-themed entities, terribly prone to deception. Instead, IPOF relies on a handful of large donors, net proceeds from several annual fundraisers; and over-the-transom contributions, designated or otherwise, often generated by media attention after a police tragedy. Since IPOF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, contributions can be tax-deductible by donors who itemize.

Another metric is the charitable commitment ratio, or percent of total expenditures spent in direct furtherance of the stated mission, which, as I noted quoting IPOF, consist of financial assistance to affected law-enforcement families. This can include certain related overhead. But in the absence of more detail, that $247,722 donated to unidentified organizations in my view wasn’t grants or other financial assistance to individuals supporting the financial assistance mandate. So I calculated IPOF’s real charitable commitment ratio for 2024 as 70%. That was no great shakes, but at least still above the BBB acceptability standard for this ratio, also 65%.

It doesn’t particularly bother me that for 2024 IPOF had $1.4 million in revenue but paid out maybe just $495,000 in cash grants to families of fallen officers. Expenditures are going to naturally vary from year to year. But this might be of reasonable interest to some would-be donors–if they knew.

I invite comments below from anyone on the issues raised above. And I’ll update this post if I hear back from Officer Cuevas. It’s all about transparency.

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