Fortune 500 Charity List

According to the 2008 Fortune 500 list, Wal-Mart is the largest publicly traded company in America. Its revenues last year were $378.8 billion. Total revenue for all the companies included in the list was $10.6 trillion.

How do America’s largest charities stack up? If the list was expanded to include nonprofits, then the American Red Cross, with $5.86 billion in total revenue, would appear at number 417. And Harvard University, with $4.99 billion in total revenue, would also make the cut landing in the 470^th spot. Together, the 500 largest charities in our database generated ­­$144.3 billion in total revenue.

Given that many nonprofits are relatively comparable in size to our country’s largest firms, shouldn’t there be some sort of federal regulatory agency, like the SEC, to monitor and regulate charities?