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About RB Consulting Services
Who we are
RB Consulting Services, LLC is an executive compensation consulting firm. Its work centers on how organizations set, review and document pay for their senior leaders, and on the federal tax rules that apply to executive pay at tax-exempt organizations.
The firm builds and maintains CauseComp. The executive benchmarks, the §4958 comparables sets, the methodology and the guides on this site come from the same compensation practice that works with boards and compensation committees directly. CauseComp is a service of RB Consulting Services, LLC.
Experience
The firm's practice rests on more than twenty years of executive compensation work across public, pre-IPO and nonprofit organizations. That experience includes senior in-house executive compensation leadership at large multinational companies, including compensation committee work at S&P 500 and FTSE 100 companies. On the nonprofit side, engagements range from local organizations to global NGOs.
- Founded: 2021
- Nonprofit engagements: more than 50
- Client size: annual budgets from a few hundred thousand dollars to hundreds of billions across all clients; the largest nonprofit clients have budgets in the hundreds of millions
- Sectors served: nonprofits across the full spectrum of missions
- Professional associations: the practice has been involved with WorldatWork, the National Association of Stock Plan Professionals (NASPP) and the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD)
What we do in a nonprofit engagement
A nonprofit engagement runs from constructing a defensible peer group and assembling comparability data through to the board documentation that supports a rebuttable presumption of reasonableness under IRC §4958, with §4960 exposure reviewed alongside. In practice that means four pieces of work:
- Peer group construction. Selecting comparable organizations and documenting the peer logic, so the board can see why each peer is there.
- Comparability data. Assembling what similar organizations pay for similar positions, drawn from the compensation nonprofits report on IRS Form 990.
- Board documentation for the rebuttable presumption. The record of what the board reviewed and decided. Documented comparability data supports — but does not by itself establish — a board's rebuttable presumption of reasonableness under IRC §4958 (intermediate sanctions). The presumption also requires advance approval by an independent board body and contemporaneous documentation. CauseComp provides comparability data for informational purposes and does not provide legal or tax advice.
- §4960 exposure review. Checking whether any employee's remuneration could trigger the excise tax on excess tax-exempt organization executive compensation.
How CauseComp fits
For many boards, CauseComp is enough. It provides executive benchmarks modeled from IRS Form 990 filings and calibrated to budget size, sector and location, §4958 comparables sets drawn from named peer organizations, and a board-ready report with its methodology. Every report shows its data vintage.
Some situations need a consultant. Complex packages, multi-entity organizations, board disputes and IRS inquiries are where the software is not enough. In those cases, get in touch with the firm. Professional subscribers get their subscription credited toward a full engagement.
Standards
How we choose sources, publish figures, review guidance and correct errors is set out in our editorial and data standards. CauseComp provides data and documentation tools, not legal or tax advice. Organizations should consult counsel on §4958 process questions.