April 29, 2004 | Read Time: 1 minute
More than 950,000 charities and private foundations were registered with the Internal Revenue Service as of
September 30, 2003, according to figures just released by the tax agency.
That is an increase of 65 percent from a decade ago, when 575,690 organizations were registered.
The number of groups classified under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code rose in 2003 by 54,844, or 6 percent, from 2002, the revenue service reported.
In 2003, a total of 964,418 charitable organizations — including 100,654 private foundations — were registered with the federal government, compared with 909,574 registered in 2002.
The number of private foundations grew by 7.2 percent, an increase of 6,801, from 2002 to 2003, the revenue service said.
The growth of charitable organizations in recent years has been fairly consistent. The number of groups increased by 5.1 percent from 2001 to 2002, 5.6 percent from 2000 to 2001, and 5.8 percent from 1999 to 2000.
The IRS has acknowledged 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 revenue service’s statistics show that the total number of tax-exempt organizations classified under all of Section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code rose by 56,867, or 3.9 percent, from 2002 to 2003.
These statistics were published in the IRS’s Data Book 2003, which is available online at http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/article/0,,id=102174,00.html.
