by The Annual Compliance Report to Members was released and made available at the Meeting of Members on Saturday, April 18th. It covers activities from January 1 to December 31 of 2025. The report covering 2024 is available in the member’s only section on the NRA website. Just look under “Governance Information.” The 2025 report should be up there sooner than later.
I should add that if you have not registered for access to this, you should. I had one director complaining to me about not being able to print the Bylaws out from within BoardVantage which is the Board’s court-mandated secure portal. He wasn’t aware he could access this information and print the Bylaws from the Governance Information section. It looks like I need to do more to make members (and directors) aware of their ability to access this information which was posted as a result of my transparency resolution that passed at the 2025 Meeting of Members.
The compliance report covers five areas: travel and entertainment expenses; contract negotiations, exceptions, and subsequent payments; related party transactions; whistleblower reports; and independent audit. Rather than rehashing both the reports covering 2024 and 2025, I will just highlight some of the year over year changes.
Travel and entertainment expenses were down by $800,000 in 2025 from the previous year. Two major factors were the locations of the Fall and Winter board meetings and the reduction in number of days of each. The officers elected in 2025 made the decision that the Fall and Winter board meetings would be held in northern Virginia exclusively. This cut down on both lodging and travel expenses for staff. Additionally, starting with the Winter board meeting, the number of days for committee meeting were cut from three to two. Authorization for lodging only began with the day of your first committee meeting. For example, at our Winter meeting, I did not have a Thursday committee meeting but still arrived on Wednesday night as I wanted to attend the Legal Affairs Committee meeting on Thursday. As I’m not on Legal Affairs, I paid for that night’s lodging out of my own pocket.
I would like to point out that there were no charter flights in 2025, no first class flights, and only four pre-authorized exceptions to fly business class due to documented medical conditions.
Looking at vendor payments especially for legal expenses they were significantly lower in 2025 than in 2024. Of course, the New York trial had been finished. In 2024, Brewer, Attorneys and Counselors, was paid $32,273,602. In 2025, they were paid 6,885,582 for prior legal services and their engagement was ended. By contrast, the NRA’s other law firm, Baker Hostetler was paid zero in 2024 and $2,416,051 in 2025. They provide our board counsel and cover most of our outside, non-2A, litigation needs. The biggest vendor in 2024 was, of course, Brewer while the largest in 2025 was Fidelity Investments. The payments to Fidelity include both employee and employer contributions to the NRA’s 401(k) plan.
The total number of whistleblower reports were similar – 58 versus 57 – but varied distinctly. For 2025, while there were a total of 57 reports, only 48 actually related to the NRA. Of these, only 12% were substantiated as opposed to 52% from the previous year. Indeed, the great majority (63%) were unsubstantiated.
In addition to the reduction in travel costs, what makes me happiest is seeing that our auditors gave the NRA a clean audit for 2025. Aprio did special tests on 21 areas and found zero non-compliance. This contrasts with six instances of non-compliance in 2024. As our Chief Compliance Officer Matthew Boyden wrote about these results, “they reflect a culture of accountability that has taken root across the organization.” The NRA is digging ourselves out of the mess we put ourselves in but we are doing it the right way and without cutting corners.
The Annual Compliance report is embedded below.
“Travel and entertainment expenses were down by $800,000 in 2025 from the previous year. … I would like to point out that there were no charter flights in 2025, no first class flights, and only four pre-authorized exceptions to fly business class due to documented medical conditions.”
One way I know that the expenses were brought down is at least one Board member, when asked to represent at events that require flight, refuses by complaining about the price & says that it can’t be reasonable to pay what is needed for whatever trip in coach (to be bought closer to last minute due to the nature of the event planning). It’s zero surprise that the area of the community this director oversees is in pretty public and open revolt against continuing to work with NRA.
“As our Chief Compliance Officer Matthew Boyden wrote about these results, ‘they reflect a culture of accountability that has taken root across the organization.'”
Kinda, maybe? I mean, I know of cases that are reported because retaliation still happens. I know the problem is that if it’s not documented with the CCO, how can action be taken? But on the other hand, even reporting it to the CCO exposes victims & those people are not removed from a position to do harm. Plus, there’s a promise made for improving whistleblower reporting after an inappropriate near stalking situation publicly documented with a trainer & the victim did not have access to where to report it. So it went public. It was suggested how to fix this and we heard from lots of Board members that Matthew was 100% on it and it was going to happen that week… It’s probably been a month now and nothing has changed. Women subject to potentially dangerous and distressing situations with people operating under the NRA brand are still denied access to instructions on how to report it and have it addressed. The “rules” for reporting were made up by a non-lawyer who has let lines be crossed repeatedly because they don’t follow those made up reporting rules.
There’s still a lot for Matthew to clean up, and I sincerely hope he does and delivers results. It’s still needed.