More Than 1 Million Tax-Exempt Groups Are Registered With the IRS

More than a million charities and private foundations were registered with the Internal Revenue Service as of September 30, 2004, according to figures released by the tax agency.

The number of groups classified under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code rose in 2004 by 45,947, or 4.8 percent, from 2003, the revenue service reported.

In 2004, a total of 1,010,365 charitable organizations — including 102,634 private foundations — were registered with the federal government, compared with 964,418 registered in 2003.

The growth of charitable organizations in recent years has been fairly consistent. The number of groups increased by 6 percent from 2002 to 2003, 5.1 percent from 2001 to 2002, and 5.6 percent from 2000 to 2001.

The IRS has acknowledged that an unknown number of the organizations classified under Section 501(c)(3) are still on the government’s books even though they have shut down.

From 2003 to 2004, the number of private foundations grew by 2 percent, an increase of 1,980, the revenue service said.

The revenue service’s statistics show that the total number of tax-exempt organizations classified under all of Section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code rose by 38,782, or 2.6 percent, from 2003 to 2004.

These statistics were published in the IRS’s Data Book 2004, which is available online at http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/article/0,,id=102174,00.html.

The chart below shows the number of organizations registered under each subcategory of Section 501(c) in 2003 and 2004, as well as the number of applications approved and denied in 2004 by IRS field offices.