December 13, 2001 | Read Time: 1 minute
New Mexico is working with Philanthropic Research, a nonprofit group in Williamsburg, Va., that posts charities’ financial data on its GuideStar Web site, to disseminate information on charities that operate in New Mexico.
New Mexico will be the first state to work with Philanthropic Research on such a database. A number of larger states, including California, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, are building their own databases of charities’ financial information.
“We’re pioneering a small-state model,” said Daniel Moore, New Mexico registrar of charitable organizations. He said that it will be cheaper for the state to work with Philanthropic Research, which already posts the Form 990 informational tax returns required by the Internal Revenue Service of more than 850,000 charities from across the nation, than to develop its own database. The project will cost less than $20,000, said Mr. Moore.
About 3,000 charities operate in New Mexico, and many already are in the Philanthropic Research database. The exceptions are those with incomes of less than $25,000 that are not required to file financial information with the IRS.
Over the next year, Mr. Moore said, the state will be giving Philanthropic Research the information it collects from charities to be posted on the GuideStar site.
A link on the Web site for the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office transfers users to a special page on the GuideStar site. The charity section on the attorney general Web site is located at http://www.ago.state.nm.us/Charity/charity.htm.
