NASCO is pleased to share the following update from The Aspen Institute:
Join the Aspen Institute in celebrating an historic victory for the nonprofit sector and our democracy!
A few years ago, the Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation (PSI) of the Aspen Institute, and its partners, set out to revolutionize nonprofit data by making it easier and cheaper for researchers and the public to access information on the U.S. nonprofit sector as a whole.
Welcome to the world of nonprofit data liberation!
Congress has passed a new law requiring the electronic filing of nonprofit tax returns and the release of those forms to the public, for free, in a searchable, machine-readable format.
The provision is part of a bipartisan IRS reform measure, the Taxpayer First Act (H.R. 3151), just approved by the Senate and recently passed in the House. The bill now awaits the President’s signature to become law; I will share updates as the bill approaches this crucial last stage.
By expanding electronic filing of nonprofit tax forms (Forms 990), and providing more complete, searchable information on nonprofit organizations, this new law will make it easier to:
- gauge the financial and programmatic health of the social sector;
- make informed charitable giving decisions;
- identify gaps in the field;
- reduce charitable fraud; and
- understand nonprofit impact on U.S. employment and the economy, among other things.
The Aspen Institute has led the push for “open” nonprofit data, working closely with its partners: Candid, Urban Institute, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, and Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. We also thank the National Association of State Charity Officials, Independent Sector, the Council on Foundations, and many others that have long expressed support for making this information more useful and accessible to the field.
If signed, the law goes into effect beginning the tax year after its enactment. A delay in implementation may be granted for small organizations1, or organizations for which Treasury determines that the law would cause an undue burden, as well as organizations filing the Form 990-T. Delays may not apply for more than two years after the law is enacted. See text of the provision here.
Form 990s contain valuable information on the missions, governance and finances of nonprofit organizations. Until fairly recently, these forms were only available and sold by the IRS as static, non-searchable images which greatly limited their potential.
This costly and inefficient system led PSI’s Nonprofit Data Project to detail the urgent need for “open Form 990 data” in Information for Impact: Liberating Nonprofit Sector Data, a report by Beth Noveck and Daniel Goroff funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. After years of advocacy, including a federal lawsuit by PublicResource.org, electronically-filed Form 990s were released as open data by the Internal Revenue Service on Amazon Web Services in June 2016. Currently, approximately 65 percent of Form 990s are electronically filed and available for free on Amazon Web Services.
Even this limited trove of data is proving to be invaluable to our understanding of the nonprofit sector. Researchers throughout the country are starting to mine previously unavailable, or inaccessible data to better understand giving trends and patterns, the geography of nonprofit activity, nonprofit mergers and much more. As one researcher stated in a recent Aspen Institute blog on the benefits of open data, “Now, the sky’s the limit.”
Thank you for your support and interest over the years – what a journey!
Warm and happy regards,
Cinthia
Cinthia Schuman Ottinger
Deputy Director for Philanthropy Programs
Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation
The Aspen Institute
2300 N St, NW, Ste 700
Washington, DC 20037
1 The term “small organization” means any organization of which the gross receipts for the taxable year are less than $200,000 and the aggregate gross assets of which at the end of the taxable year are less than $500,000.