The Harrington Foundation had been established in 1971 by Edward Harrington Sr., who had spent forty years building a shipping empire and who had decided, at the end of his life, that he wanted to give his money away in a way that would outlast him and that would be immune to the failures of his heirs. He had established the foundation with a board of directors that was self-perpetuating — meaning that the board filled its own vacancies — and with a dissolution clause that required a unanimous vote of all living trustees and all living beneficiaries, which meant, in practice, that the foundation could not be dissolved without the agreement of people who had opposite interests and no reason to cooperate.

The foundation owned, at its peak, four hundred and twelve million dollars in assets. It owned shipping company stock, real estate, a controlling interest in a bank in Delaware, and a collection of impressionist paintings that had been acquired by Edward Sr. at prices that had seemed reasonable in 1971 and that had become, by 2024, worth approximately the same as the shipping company stock. The foundation’s annual giving was modest — approximately eight million dollars per year, distributed in grants to maritime education programs and coastal conservation efforts, both of which were causes that Edward Sr. had cared about and both of which were causes that his granddaughter, Margot, who had been fighting the foundation’s board for six years, found it very difficult to动员 public support against.

Margot had inherited her grandfather’s stubbornness without inheriting his talent for long-term thinking, which was why she had spent six years fighting a board that had been specifically designed to be resistant to fighting. She had sued the foundation twice. She had sought to have the board removed. She had argued that the foundation was not fulfilling its charitable mission. She had argued that the board was mismanaged. She had argued, in the court of public opinion, that four hundred million dollars in assets was too much for a foundation that gave away eight million per year and that the foundation should be compelled to increase its giving or be dissolved. None of these arguments had prevailed. The foundation’s board had good attorneys and patient trustees and a legal structure that Edward Sr. had designed precisely to make Margot’s kind of fighting very expensive and very slow.

The thing that Margot discovered, in the seventh year of her campaign, was not something she was looking for. She had been reviewing the foundation’s tax filings, which are public documents, and she had noticed a discrepancy between the foundation’s stated investment returns and the actual performance of the assets listed in the filings. The foundation reported, on average, a return of six percent per year on its investment portfolio. The portfolio, as described in the filings, should have returned closer to nine percent, given the composition of the holdings. The difference was not large — approximately eleven million dollars per year — but it was consistent, and it had been consistent for nineteen years, and eleven million dollars per year compounded over nineteen years was approximately three hundred and forty million dollars, which was a significant fraction of the foundation’s stated assets and which was, Margot suspected, not missing but misreported.

She hired a forensic accountant. The forensic accountant found what Margot had suspected: the foundation’s actual returns were being underreported, not through error but through a systematic accounting choice that reduced the foundation’s stated income and therefore reduced the amount the foundation was required to give away each year under federal law. The foundation was hoarding, legally, three hundred and forty million dollars that it should have been distributing, by holding its assets at values that were lower than their actual market values and by classifying certain gains as unrealized losses.

Margot did not sue the foundation for this. She had learned, from six years of litigation, that suing the foundation was expensive and slow and that the foundation’s board had been designed to outlast her willingness to pay legal fees. Instead, she sent the forensic accountant’s findings to the IRS. She sent them to the state attorney general. She sent them to the Wall Street Journal. She sent them to every journalist who had ever written about the Harrington Foundation, which was not many, but who were, it turned out, very interested in the story of a foundation that had been hoarding three hundred and forty million dollars while giving eight million per year to causes that its founder had cared about, which was the kind of story that made journalists feel like they were doing something important.

The IRS investigation took fourteen months. The foundation’s board members were assessed penalties and back taxes. The foundation was required to distribute its hoard over a period of five years, at the end of which it would have approximately ninety million dollars remaining — enough to continue giving eight million per year for eleven years, after which the foundation would be the kind of size that Margot’s grandfather had probably intended, which was a foundation that gave away money rather than accumulating it, and that was honest about the difference between those two things.

Margot was not thanked for her role in the investigation. The foundation’s board did not acknowledge her. The state attorney general’s report mentioned her as the source of the complaint but did not commend her. The journalists wrote their stories and moved on to other stories. Margot went back to her life, which was the life of a woman who had spent seven years fighting a foundation and who had, in the end, won — not because she had been right, but because she had been persistent, and because persistence, in the long run, is a kind of correctness, and the foundation’s board had learned this too late, which was the only way that anyone learns anything that matters.