How The Chronicle’s Survey on Corporate Giving Was Compiled

The Chronicle’s annual survey on corporate giving offers a glimpse of the state of philanthropy

at many of the nation’s largest businesses. The survey is based on information provided by companies ranked according to their annual revenue in Fortune magazine’s Fortune 500.

The 150 largest companies in the Fortune 500 were asked to provide figures on their charitable giving in 2003, 2004, and 2005. Information was obtained from 94 of those companies. A company either filled out a Chronicle questionnaire or The Chronicle obtained a copy of a company foundation’s informational tax return for the 2004 fiscal year, a form that must be filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

While federal law makes foundation tax returns open to the public, businesses are not otherwise legally required to disclose details about their corporate giving. Because many companies do not provide this information to the public, it is difficult to get a complete picture of corporate giving at the nation’s top companies.

The 56 companies that declined to provide information offered a variety of reasons for not participating. Cardinal Health, a pharmaceutical and health-products wholesaler in Dublin, Ohio, said it could not complete the survey because it did not have enough staff members to do the job. Berkshire Hathaway, an insurance company in Omaha, declined because it is its policy not to participate in surveys. Other companies did not respond to repeated requests for information or gave no reason for declining to participate in the survey.

The Chronicle survey asked companies to provide data on donations from the entire business, including subsidiaries, and for all gifts to charities in the United States and other countries.

Readers should be cautious about making comparisons among companies from year to year. Some companies may not have reported complete giving numbers because they could not track how much their affiliates gave. In other cases, companies may have been able to provide figures only for their foundations, which makes it difficult to compare one company with another.

Readers also should be cautious in comparing year-to-year figures for the individual companies, because a business may have lost subsidiaries, merged with another company, or changed accounting practices. For example, UPS’s giving in 2004 appears to have decreased from 2003, but 2003 giving figures were higher than they normally would have been because the company’s foundation paid grants pledged in 2002 in the 2003 fiscal year.

Readers should also keep in mind that the percentage of giving compared with pretax profits may vary from year to year because of corporate changes.

Pfizer’s increase in pretax profits from $3.3-billion in 2003 to $14-billion in 2004 was due to a one-time accounting charge related to the acquisition of the Pharmacia Corporation in April 2003, so the percentage of Pfizer’s giving when compared with the previous year’s pretax profits is a larger-than-normal 38.6 percent.

At least two companies — Time Warner and Gap — changed the way they accounted for donations of products and services, and as a result, the amount they contributed in those forms appears to have risen sharply. At Gap, the company is working with Gifts In-Kind International, a charity in Arlington, Va., to keep better track of jeans, T-shirts, and other products its local stores donate. In Time Warner’s response to the Chronicle survey, it included the dollar value of more pro bono services offered by the company’s subsidiaries, such as the free Internet connections America Online provides to nonprofit groups.

Officials at both companies said they have been working harder to better keep track of product giving. “Part of the reason that number jumped so much is that we have better tracking capabilities internally,” said Gail Gershon, director of the Gap Foundation. “So the number might be a little bit misleading because it’s not that we made a conscious effort to give more product.”

The survey does not take into account paid time off that some companies give their employees so they may volunteer at charities, or money raised by employees themselves.

Following are the companies that declined to provide any financial information about their philanthropy to The Chronicle or could not provide information from their most recent informational tax-return filings.

Abbott Laboratories (Abbott Park, Ill.)
Amerada Hess Corporation (New York)
American Electric Power Company (Columbus, Ohio)
American Express Company (New York)
American International Group (New York)
AmerisourceBergen Corporation (Chesterbrook, Pa.)
AMR Corporation (Dallas-Fort Worth Airport)
AutoNation (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)
Berkshire Hathaway (Omaha)
Cardinal Health (Dublin, Ohio)
Caremark Rx (Nashville)
Cendant Corporation (New York)
Cigna Corporation (Philadelphia)
Comcast Corporation (Philadelphia)
Computer Sciences Corporation (El Segundo, Calif.)
Countrywide Financial Corporation (Calabasas, Calif.)
Delphi Corporation (Troy, Mich.)
Emerson (St. Louis)
Express Scripts (St. Louis)
FedEx Corporation (Memphis)
General Dynamics Corporation (Falls Church, Va.)
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company (Akron, Ohio)
Halliburton Company (Houston)
Home Depot (Atlanta)
Ingram Micro (Santa Ana, Calif.)
Johnson Controls (Milwaukee)
Kmart Corporation (Troy, Mich.)
Lear Corporation (Southfield, Mich.)
Liberty Mutual Insurance Company (Boston)
Loews Corporation (New York)
Lowe’s Companies (North Wilkesboro, N.C.)
Marathon Oil Corporation (Houston)
Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (Springfield)
McDonald’s Corporation (Oak Brook, Ill.)
MCI (Ashburn, Va.)
Medco Health Solutions (Franklin Lakes, N.J.)
News Corporation (New York)
Northrop Grumman Corporation (Los Angeles)
Plains All American Pipeline (Houston)
Premcor (Old Greenwich, Conn.)
Publix Super Markets (Lakeland, Fla.)
Rite Aid Corporation (Camp Hill, Pa.)
Sears, Roebuck and Company (Hoffman Estates, Ill.)
Staples (Framingham, Mass.)
Sunoco (Philadelphia)
Sysco Corporation (Houston)
Teachers Insurance & Annuity Association College Retirement Equities Fund (New York)
Tech Data Corporation (Clearwater, Fla.)
UAL Corporation (Elk Grove Township, Ill.)
UnitedHealth Group (Minnetonka, Minn.)
United States Steel (Pittsburgh)
Valero Energy Corporation (San Antonio)
Viacom (New York)
Visteon Corporation (Van Buren Township, Mich.)
WellPoint (Indianapolis)
Wyeth (Madison, N.J.)

The Chronicle‘s annual survey of corporate giving was conducted by Leah Kerkman and Cassie J. Moore.