Financial Disclosures by Charities Now on the Internet

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 18, 1999—For the first time, anyone with access to the Internet will be able to view, compare, and contrast the financial activities of all public charities that file financial disclosure forms annually with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

These filings—known as Forms 990—have been scanned, archived, and made easily searchable on the Web through an ambitious and unique public/private partnership of Philanthropic Research, Inc. (PRI), and the Urban Institute's National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) in cooperation with the IRS.

A Form 990 provides specific information on a charity's revenues, expenses, executive salaries, board members, programs, and activities. With the exception of religious organizations, any charity with annual gross receipts of more than $25,000 is required to file Form 990 with the IRS.

In the past, gaining access to such information was difficult and time consuming. Having to write either to the IRS or directly to charities kept much of the public from getting financial information on individual charities and discouraged research and analysis of financial data needed to compare organizations with similar missions. Now all this will change as the public, researchers, policymakers, and the nonprofit sector itself make use of this powerful tool.

Anyone can access any charity's Form 990 immediately at Web sites established by the NCCS (http://nccs.urban.org) and PRI (http://www.guidestar.org). Extensive search options enable easy access to compare information about all the charities in the country. Web users can search, for instance, by name or key word, by city, state, zip code, revenue size, or type of organization.

Accessing the Forms 990 through NCCS (http://nccs.urban.org) allows the user to compare and contrast the financial activities of groups of charities at a very detailed level. Someone interested in the top 50 art museums in the country, for instance, can now review their finances and activities in a systematic and comprehensive way. A spreadsheet listing the major financial variables for the charities in question can be created from the existing NCCS database, and can now be enriched with new data from the Forms 990. A more detailed financial portrait of these organizations with up-to-date information on their revenues, expenditures, executive salaries, ratio of fundraising expense to total revenues, and so on—over 600 parameters in all—can be developed.

"Timely, in-depth disclosure of this public information will revolutionize our understanding of charitable organizations—their structure, missions, investment income, administrative costs, and interactions with the government and the business sectors," said Elizabeth Boris, Director of the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute, which houses the National Center for Charitable Statistics. "Using this powerful tool, individuals can become more informed donors and policy and legislative leaders better decisionmakers," Boris added.

The NCCS/GuideStar project was funded by foundations, which contributed about $3 million for the scanning of the images and the digitization of the information.

About the Collaborators:

The National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) was established in 1982 and has been a program of the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute since July 1996, when it was transferred from the research division of INDEPENDENT SECTOR. Its repository of data on the nonprofit sector serves as the basis for research on the relationships between the nonprofit sector, government, the commercial sector, and the broader civil society. The Web site http://nccs.urban.org serves as a gateway to the many databases on the nonprofit sector compiled by the National Center on Charitable Statistics.

Philanthropic Research, Inc., itself a nonprofit, launched its GuideStar site three years ago to enable all U.S. charities to showcase their mission, their accomplishments, and their financial data. Concurrent with co-launching the Forms 990 Web site, GuideStar is providing updated reports on over 100,000 charities to help inform the general public so donors can give with greater confidence.

To access Form 990 data, go to: http://nccs.urban.org or http://www.guidestar.org.

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