February 21, 2002 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Internal Revenue Service has issued a report tracing the growth of charities from 1997 to 1998.
The number of charities in the United States that filed Form 990 and Form 990-EZ informational tax returns with the government rose from 198,957 in 1997 to 207,273 in 1998, an increase of 4.2 percent. That figure was higher than the 3.6-percent increase that was observed from 1996 to 1997 but lower than the 6.2-percent rise that was seen from 1995 to 1996.
The IRS noted that, under the law, most of the 607,906 charities the government considered to be active in 1998 did not have to file informational returns. Those include churches and certain other religious organizations, as well as groups with annual gross receipts totaling less than $25,000. The new IRS statistics also do not count the number of private foundations that filed Form 990-PF returns.
Total revenue reported by charities was $752-billion in 1998, a slight decrease from the $754.6-billion in the previous year, the data showed.
Total assets of charities fell to $1.35-trillion, a decrease of 6 percent from the $1.44-trillion reported in 1997.
But the IRS said that overall decreases in revenue and assets in 1998 can be attributed to two large, related pension organizations that filed informational tax returns for 1997 but not for the following year — the Teachers Insurance Annuity Association and the College Retirement Equities Fund, collectively known as TIAA-CREF, which had their tax exemptions revoked by Congress in 1997.
The revenue service said that if information about the two organizations were excluded from 1997 data, the total revenue reported by charities would have increased by 6.4 percent from 1997 to 1998, and total assets would have risen by 10.4 percent.
The government data appeared in the Internal Revenue Service’s fall 2001 Statistics of Income Bulletin. For a copy, send $34 to the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, P.O. Box 371954, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15250-7954.
