Following the Money: Investigating Nonprofits and Getting to Know 990s
- Elizabeth Clemons
- May 1
- 6 min read
Updated: May 3
Tip Sheet
with Andrea Suozzo, lead maintainer of ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer and news applications developer. Contact her here.
This tip sheet from Following the Money: Investigating Nonprofits and Getting to Know 990s provides valuable information on documents available for tax-exempt organizations, tools for finding information on nonprofits, and Nonprofit Explorer tips.
Watch the recording of this workshop session here.
Documents available for tax-exempt organizations
Application
Form 1023/1023EZ/1024/1024A: These forms become available once an organization’s tax-exempt status is approved. Denied applications are not public. Request them from the IRS via form 4506B; this can take more than a month, so plan accordingly if you’re on deadline. If you can’t get the submit button in the PDF to work, the email address for submissions is: tege-eo-my.eo.request@irs.gov
Form 1023EZ: These applications are also available in a dataset, released annually.
Approval
Determination letter: These letters get sent to an organization once its status is approved. They are typically posted on the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search, and can also be requested via form 4506B.
Exempt Organizations Business Master File: A roster of every active exempt organization the IRS has approved, along with details on the organization type, ruling date, most recent filing, etc. Updated monthly here.
Publication 78: A dataset of every organization that may accept charitable donations. Download here.
Annual filings
990/990EZ/990PF: The standard tax return forms for tax-exempt organizations. The 990 is the standard form, but smaller organizations fill out the EZ, and private foundations fill out the PF. Organizations have five months after the close of their fiscal year to file, but many request an extension. Because of that, it can take more than a year after the close of the organization’s fiscal year for these forms to become available. They are available through search tools like Nonprofit Explorer and the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search, or as bulk downloads from the IRS. You can also sign up for email alerts for an organization on Nonprofit Explorer to get notified when a new filing is posted, request a specific 990 using Form 4506A or request a filing directly from the organization.
Schedules: Depending on how an organization operates, it may have to submit additional information to the IRS on its annual tax form — from information about lobbying and political activities (Schedule C) to information about hospital operations (Schedule H). This is often where the interesting stuff is! Here’s a full list of schedules for reference.
Note: Schedule B, which lists contributions to the organization, is not considered public and is redacted in files released by the IRS, though an organization may choose to make its Schedule B available (ProPublica does, for example). Schedule I, which lists grants from the organization to other organizations and individuals, is public.
990N: Organizations with annual gross receipts under $50,000 are only required to file the e-postcard, which affirms that they are still in business. These filings are available as a data download, as well as through the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search.
990T: Exempt organizations with taxable income must file the 990T to declare that income and pay taxes on that amount. 990Ts are available through Nonprofit Explorer (though currently two years delayed, since the IRS is behind on releasing 990 PDF files) and through the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search.
Audit: Organizations that spend $750,000 in federal grant money in a given fiscal year must submit an audit to the Federal Audit Clearinghouse. These documents are available via the FAC search and on Nonprofit Explorer.
Annual financial data extract: The IRS compiles top-line financial and governance data reported on the 990 forms into datasets and releases them annually. Note that these datasets are grouped by year the IRS processed a form, not by fiscal year. Downloads and documentation here.
Termination/revocation
Automatic Revocation of Exemption List: A dataset of organizations that did not file a
tax return for three consecutive years and have had their federal tax-exempt status
revoked. Dataset here, and revocations also appear in the IRS Tax Exempt Organization
Tools for finding information on nonprofit
A database of tax-exempt organizations and We fully rebuilt this tool in 2023 to make searching and filtering better, and to add email notifications so you can watch organizations for new filings. Webinar.
Another nonprofit lookup tool that is oriented to fundraisers, but has some useful geographic search features. Additionally, on an organization’s page, it will show you what other organizations reported giving grants to that organization. Some of the features are paywalled, but the free view can yield useful information.
This is the IRS search portal; I recommend finding an organization’s EIN using another search tool, because the text searching capability is not great. This tool will show you whether an organization is on the Publication 78 list (the organization can accept tax-exempt donations), the auto-revocation list (the organization has failed to file for three years) and a copy of the determination letter notifying the organization of its tax-exempt status, if available.
Note: The 990 filings available through this portal are about two years out of date as of June 2024; use Nonprofit Explorer or another tool to find more current 990s.
State charity databases
If an organization is based in or has operations in a state, it may be required to file their 990 and/or additional paperwork annually. Also, if the state has a charitable enforcement division — usually housed within the attorney general’s office — you may be able to get records from enforcement actions.
Nonprofit accountants/tax lawyers
Because nonprofit regulation varies a lot from state to state, I recommend finding someone who can speak to the specific state statutes and regulatory environment in your state — the 990 is a federal tax form, but a lot of nonprofit oversight and regulation happens at the state level!
990 raw data
The IRS releases 990s in machine-readable XML format, which can allow you to extract every single field of the thousands on a 990. If you’re looking for something specific, like a checkbox on a schedule or a list of employees and board members for every nonprofit in a specific state, you’ll probably need to turn to these data files.
These files used to be available in an S3 bucket hosted by the IRS, which made it very easy to access a specific subset of files you were looking for. They no longer are, but thanks to a new collaborative effort hosted by GivingTuesday, there’s once again an S3 bucket that you can use to access these files. This Python library makes it easier to extract data out of these files across years (the ProPublica fork of the library is currently a bit more up-to-date but, disclaimer, not fully tested, so it can handle some of the variable changes in recent years)
Nonprofit Explorer tips
Email notifications
If you want to make sure you know when an organization’s next filing is published, hit
“subscribe” on the organization’s page and enter your email — we’ll email you when we post
something new for that organization.
Advanced search
Don’t sleep on the advanced search boolean options (accessible from the homepage). If you’re trying to find a name or address with common variants or misspellings, these options can help you identify more occurrences.
Finding grants to an organization
Though Schedule B (donors) is redacted in most 990-family filings that the IRS releases (with exceptions for private foundations), nonprofits must disclose grants to other organizations. This means that you can use the filing text search to find donations to a nonprofit on the filings from other nonprofits using an organization’s name or employer identification number (EIN).
Form 990, Schedule I contains the grants table, so searching for ProPublica’s EIN and filtering to Schedule I will get you organizations that reported making grants to ProPublica on their filings.
Note, however, that the EIN field doesn’t exist on the grants table of the 990PF, the form that private foundations file. To search for those, you can instead do a search for the organization’s name or address and filter to form type “990PF”.
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