A nonprofit organization is an organization that uses its surplus revenues to further achieve its purpose or mission, rather than distributing its surplus income to the organization's directors. The decision to adopt a non profit legal structure is one that will often have taxation implications, particularly where the nonprofit seeks income tax exemption, charitable status and so on. “Non-profit institution are legal or social entities created for the purpose of producing goods and services whose status does not permit them to be a source of income, profit, or other financial gain for the units that establish, control or finance them. In practice their productive activities are bound to generate either surpluses or deficits but any surpluses they happen to make cannot be appropriated by other institutional units.” That basis for defining NPIs, which focuses on the common characteristic that they do not distribute their profits, in a central feature of most definitions of “the non-profit sector” in law and social science literature.