Nonprofit groups often seek restitution, not prosecution, when money goes missing "We had an agreement that as long as the payments were made, that we would not pursue anything else," Lewis said. The institute declined to publicly identify the manager. Elizabeth Kennedy, who was executive director in 2010, left about the time of the discovery, and the institute's financial records state that she has since "repaid" tens of thousands of dollars to the institute. She declined to discuss the institute's loss and, asked whether she had embezzled the money, said, "No comment." Since leaving the institute, Kennedy has gone on to work for nonprofit and political groups in Florida, serving as finance director at one, documents and interviews show. The institute's loss was among more than 1,000 "significant diversions" of assets discovered during a Washington Post analysis of federal disclosure records filed by nonprofit groups across the country. The Post's analysis found that after such a discovery, some nonprofit groups issued public statements and some called in law enforcement. But many others mirrored the institute's response, bypassing legal action in exchange for cash. "A lot of organizations that have these problems shy away from prosecuting, because they don't want the publicity and they don't want donors to shy away from them," said Chicago lawyer and charity consultant Jack B. Siegel. Organizations look for every way possible to minimize the disclosure. It's in no one's interest at the charity to make it public. Charity fraud specialist Gary Snyder called public disclosure essential. "If people are allowed to walk away, they will just go somewhere else," he said. In the institute's case, Lewis said the organization simply chose to focus on staying afloat and pursuing its policy goals. In its federal filing, the think tank's account of the loss was a terse, two-sentence reference in a lengthy document filed a year after the discovery, stating that an unnamed employee had embezzled "some" of its funds for personal use. Lewis said that until contacted by The Post, he did not realize that the institute's accountants had included the reference and that the incident had not been made public elsewhere. The institute has since recovered all of the funds, he said. Many of the diversions identified by The Post were described as acts of theft and fraud carried out by insiders, contractors and investment advisers. While the diversions totaled hundreds of millions of dollars, the newspaper's investigation also found that many of the groups - like the institute - failed to divulge how much they had lost, even though federal filing instructions direct charities to disclose the amount of money or property involved.