April 18, 2002 | Read Time: 1 minute
More than 850,000 charities and private foundations were registered with the Internal
Revenue Service as of September 30, 2001, according to figures just released by the tax agency.
The number of groups classified under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code rose by 46,088, or 5.6 percent, from 2000 to 2001, the revenue service reported.
In 2001, 865,096 organizations, including 88,509 private foundations, were registered with the federal government, compared with 819,008 in 2000.
The number of private foundations grew by 10 percent from 2000 to 2001, up from 80,420 in 2000, the revenue service said.
The growth in the number of charitable organizations has been fairly consistent in recent years.
They increased by 5.8 percent from 1999 to 2000, 5.5 percent from 1998 to 1999, and 6 percent from 1997 to 1998.
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 45,163, or 3.3 percent, from 2000 to 2001.
The statistics were published in the 2001 edition of the Internal Revenue Service’s Data Book, which is available online at http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/display/
0,,i1%3D40%26genericId%3D16907,00.html.
The chart below shows the number of organizations registered under each category of Section 501(c) in 2000 and 2001, as well as the number of tax-exemption applications approved and denied in 2001 by the Internal Revenue Service.
