March 23, 2000 | Read Time: 1 minute
Copies of the informational tax returns filed by the nation’s approximately 56,000 private foundations are scheduled to go online this week.
As part of its efforts to make financial information about non-profit organizations more accessible to the public, the organization Philanthropic Research and the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics are putting the foundations’ tax returns, known as Forms 990-PF, on their Web sites.
The most recent copy of the entire form filed by each private foundation — some running hundreds of pages — will be available at Philanthropic Research’s GuideStar Web site (http://www.guidestar.org) and the center’s Web site (http://nccs.urban.org). The filings are for tax years 1998 and 1999.
The two organizations began their collaboration with an effort to put online the Form 990 informational tax returns that many charities must file.
The approximately 210,000 charity tax forms had to be removed from the Web sites, however, after it was discovered that confidential information had been included. The organizations are now in the process of going through those returns, removing the confidential information, and putting the public data online again.
GuideStar is now putting up 990’s at a rate of about 35,000 per month, and expects to complete the job of getting them all online within six months.
