Ken SchwenckeDec 22, 2022

One of the things my team @ProPublica does is run our Nonprofit Explorer database. It’s super popular and useful, but it relies on IRS data to run.

So we’re in a unique position to both see that the IRS is failing at its duty to make this data available and also to be able to report on it as news: https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-hasnt-released-nearly-half-million-nonprofit-tax-records

The IRS Hasn’t Released Nearly Half a Million Nonprofit Tax Records

If you’re trying to evaluate a charity this year, you might have a hard time. The IRS is behind on releasing Form 990s, limiting access to key financial information the public uses to evaluate the nation’s tax-exempt companies.

ProPublica
Show threadMark DavisDec 22, 2022
@ken @ProPublica Thanks for bringing up this issue as my company has also been frustrated. We automatically sourced data from the AWS open 990 filings for use in our donor advised fund platform. Once the IRS took ownership we suddenly lost access to 2 years of filings 😔
Show threadKen SchwenckeDec 22, 2022
@davisml @ProPublica thankfully we’d been making copies all along 🙃
Show threadMark Davis
@ken @ProPublica We had copies of derived data but not the XML source files themselves. Definitely learned a valuable lesson and now we keep a full copy of the source data in a private S3 bucket.
Dec 22, 2022 at 2:40pmWeb