October 16, 1997 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Charities can take advantage of a high-tech option to comply with a law that will soon require them to make their informational tax returns easy to obtain, the Internal Revenue Service has said.
In new rules it proposed to carry out the law, the service said a charity could post an electronic version of its return — called a Form 990 — on its own World-Wide Web site or on another group’s site as part of a data base of similar documents of other organizations. Charities that take that route can get an exemption from the new law’s requirement that they hand out photocopies of the return, as long as they:
* Post the Form 990 in the same format that the I.R.S. itself uses to post forms and publications on its own Web site.
* Make clear to those using the Web site that the Form 990 is available for free and provide instructions for downloading it.
* Make sure that when the form is downloaded and a copy printed out, it is in “substantially the same form” as the original Form 990.
The I.R.S. estimated that annually only about 1,000 tax-exempt groups would make their returns available through the Internet.
Not all charity officials think the Internet is the best way to distribute information. Some point to the number of people who do not have ready access to computers and who therefore would have trouble receiving charity data.
However, Marc Owens, director of the I.R.S.’s Exempt Organizations Division, said, “There are libraries now that have machines with public access. The number of people and places with Internet access is dramatically increasing.”
Other charity leaders said they planned to ask the I.R.S. to allow tax-exempt groups to post their forms using formats that are not exactly the same as those the revenue service uses for forms on its site. The I.R.S. primarily uses a format known as “PDF” or Adobe Acrobat files, which make it easy to provide electronic replicas of paper forms, but which also require users to download a free software program to read them.
Cliff Landesman, founder of the Internet Nonprofit Center, wants the I.R.S. to expand the rules to include electronic files in the format that his group is using to create an Internet clearinghouse of charity returns. The files, which use hypertext markup language — or H.T.M.L. — will contain the same information, in essentially the same order, but will differ slightly in appearance from the I.R.S. forms.
Mr. Landesman argued that allowing use of that format could actually provide some improvements over the paper forms.
“With paper, there’s an effort to try to fit as much information as possible on a single page, even if that means using small fonts and having items very close together,” said Mr. Landesman. “But there’s no need to do that on a Web page.” (A sample of a Form 990 in H.T.M.L. can be found at: http://www.nonprofits.org/library/gov/990/>start2.html.)
Mr. Owens of the I.R.S. said he welcomed such suggestions: “If individuals who are more computer savvy than we are — and I’m sure there are legions of them — have alternative and better suggestions, please send them in.”
