June 10, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
More than 1.1 million charities and private foundations were registered with the Internal Revenue Service as of September 30, 2007, according to figures released by the tax agency.
The IRS reported that the number of groups classified under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code rose from 2006 to 2007 by 64,176, or 6 percent — the highest percentage increase in four years.
In 2007, a total of 1,128,367 charities and foundations were registered with the federal government, compared with 1,064,191 in 2006.
The number of groups classified under Section 501(c)(3) has increased by 73 percent over the past dozen years. In 1996, the revenue service counted a total of 654,186 of them.
Until last year, the pace of growth of all charitable organizations had been gradually slowing down. The number of groups increased by 1.7 percent from 2005 to 2006; 3.5 percent from 2004 to 2005; 4.8 percent from 2003 to 2004; and 6 percent from 2002 to 2003.
The IRS acknowledges 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.
The IRS’s statistics show that the total number of tax-exempt organizations classified under all parts of Section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code rose by 62,827, or 4 percent, from 2006 to 2007.
The statistics were published in the IRS’s Data Book for 2007.
