Object level take: IANAL, but I'd be surprised if the first one of these is illegal. It doesn't even seem ethically questionable to me; I expect very many charities carry out similar activities without issue.

Regarding the second, if this level of "data collection" is illegal, then virtually every group or organization that exists is breaking that law. (It might still be illegal, though -- the GDPR is a very badly written law.)

Speaking with a legal background:

You should probably do a bit more research than a single copy+paste from a summary on a gov website. This is very, very bare bones - something I wouldn't accept from a term 1 student paper (for example). Consulting a professional is obviously preferable but even without that, actually looking at any relevant Act or legal decisions would dramatically improve this. I think it is incredibly poor to post this with such little investigation.

Also whistleblowing (as your name suggests), can be done internally in the org, raised to the org or to a superior within the org, or so forth - doing so on a public forum is not actually whistleblowing that may be protected by law. It all depends on what avenues are available (such as if you've been ignored, or fear reprisals or so forth) and what you have tried elsewhere.

Hi, thanks for raising these questions. I wanted to confirm that Effective Ventures has seen this and is looking into it. We take our legal obligations seriously and have started an internal review to make sure we know the relevant facts.

Have you spoken to any lawyers about this? This seems like important due diligence, that I would personally feel was important to carry out before posting something like this.

On the first point -- at least in the US, there are rules about organizations engaging in transactions where a trustee/director has a financial interest. Generally, the involved trustee/director needs to recuse, and the remainder of the board needs to make certain findings. Not sure how this works when the decision to make a purchase is delegated to staff. There's nothing in the first point that makes me concerned. 

However, there have been shady book purchases by other (non-EA) non-profits -- so it's not an unreasonable thing to ask questions about book purchasing (although making accusations out of the gate is too strong). For instance, I've heard of US churches buying up a ton of their lead pastor's book in the first week of release to make it hit the US best-seller lists for a week; the specific way in which the books were purchased was inefficient/costly and designed to evade rules on bulk purchases not unduly affecting the best-seller lists. In that case, the church's action created an improper private benefit in my opinion (with a possible exception if the royalties for the book went to the church rather than the pastor). Again, I don't see any reason to think EVF or anyone else in EA has engaged in this sort of behavior.

I can't speak to the letter of the law, but there are obviously good reasons for CEA  to distribute the best books that have been written on EA (which certainly include Will's books), and to have Will as a keynote speaker.  So the law would clearly be messed up if it prohibited this: it would effectively mean that charities cannot include relevant "thought leaders" amongst their trustees.  In such a case, I would think any sensible person should agree to the need to reform the idiotic law, rather than zealously enforce it.

But hopefully the law is more sensible than the authors of this post suggest.

IANAL, so I will just quote another government website, but I would be very surprised if accusation 1 holds any water. This was not difficult to find at all; also it seems a bit odd to first admit to not understanding what "legal authority" means but bringing the accusation forth anyway.

" A charity can pay a trustee for the supply of any goods or services over and above normal trustee duties. The decision to do this must be made by those trustees who will not benefit. [...].

Examples of goods or services that may be provided by a trustee in return for payment under the power in the Charities Act include:

• the delivery of a lecture
• a piece of research work...
• the occasional use of a trustee’s premises or facilities

"
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/trustee-expenses-and-payments-cc11/trustee-expenses-and-payments#s5-3

I think it's important to distinguish between morality and legal compliance. I don't think anybody involved here was immoral, but it sounds like there are questions to answer about whether CEA / EVF acted illegally (whether through deliberate decision or lack of competence). Hopefully they will be answered quickly and conclusively, so we can all move on.

On the book deal, a good way to structure this (i.e. achieving the same objective, but in a legally compliant way) would be for perhaps with CEA / EVF owning the copyright. In that way, they can receive all the proceeds or structure the deal such that all proceeds get diverted elsewhere. This might well have been what they did.

If it was indeed structured with Will receiving money and then donating it onwards, then at a minimum he should have recused himself from the decision-making on that issue (which he might well have done) but probably should have stood down as a trustee because of its materiality. I don't think it's right to focus just on the books actually purchased by EVF. If a charity spends money promoting a trustee's book, that trustee is receiving a direct benefit from that charity and should stand down if it is material.

"Mom, can we have more EA whistleblowers"
"No, we have EA Whistleblowers at home"

EA whistleblowers at home

The fact that this is being strongly downvoted without comment is disturbing. If the legal claim were wrong, and Effective Ventures had done the due diligence to know they were wrong, it would be trivial for one of the staff to say so. As it is, this looks worryingly like a concerted effort to hide this post. 

If you are a downvoter who sincerely thinks the post is wrong or in bad faith but don't feel motivated to explain why, please consider at least identifying yourself to falsify this paranoid take (yes, we recognise the irony of asking this). 

We appreciate the reply! 

Why do you feel you deserve a defense from someone involved in these scenarios or at EV?

We don't ask for a defence! We think that if the laws have been broken, then it's important that the EA community and its critics are aware of this.

There are also perfectly reasonable explanations for these situations that don't involve illegal activity.

Also in good faith: could you describe an example reasonable explanation? We might have misinterpreted the relevant laws, but it seems unambiguous that the first case is against the law as described unless the 'adequate legal authority' clause applies - and if it does, then it seems unambiguously not against the law. Similarly, if the GDPR functions as the quoted text implies (and if Cremer's account was accurate, which isn't a given), it seems unambiguous that this manner of storing data contravenes it.

After this post I started to make a private spreadsheet of the EA forum users with the silliest takes, ranked by silliness. But I couldn't finish, because while I was using the spreadsheet app a grey van pulled up and two men ordered me into the back. They're telling me I'm being extradited to Europe to answer for my GDPR violations. Halp.