DES MOINES, Iowa

The Iowa City-based nonprofit organization that develops ACT college entrance tests pays its board and its top executive more than almost all other nonprofit organizations in the United States.

ACT Inc. pays its 14-member board of directors about $520,000 a year and its chairman and CEO Richard Ferguson a base salary of about $508,000 annually, according to a copyright story in the Des Moines Sunday Register.

Ferguson’s pay exceeds most of his peers who run like-sized for-profit testing or education businesses nationally and nearly all nonprofit executive directors around the country, according to ERI Economic Research Institute, a company that collects national data on for-profit and nonprofit compensation.

Students, school districts, states and other organizations pay more than $1.2 million a year in fees to ACT Inc.

“They don’t have any shareholders,” said Bob Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, a critic of ACT. “So they have been drawing heavily on the fees students pay for these tests and using them to feather their own nest.”

Ferguson said ACT’s mission has grown significantly in recent years, and the company’s board compensation reflects that.

“We have this extremely engaged and active board,” he said. “That’s not true of most voluntary boards that people sit on.”

Directors were paid $37,000 to $53,000, according to the company’s 2005 tax return, its most recent available filing to the Internal Revenue Service.

“Those numbers are high,” said Bruce Hopkins, a Kansas City-based expert and author of several books on nonprofits. “I have not seen numbers like you are talking about before.”

ACT increased the compensation for its board in 2002, the same year it restructured its board and split the company into two divisions work force development and education.

The ACT board’s role is to optimize the company’s success as standardized testing becomes more widely used.