Searchable 990s!

I had a substantive post I was going to write today about a recent PLR. It was going to be fascinating, and I was going to raise a question about why the IRS drafted the PLR the way it did.

And then I opened Twitter. And saw this:

New: Search the full text of nearly 3 million nonprofit IRS filings, including investments and grants given to other nonprofits.https://t.co/LyCBYe6evq

— ProPublica (@propublica) June 6, 2019

And there went my productivity for the day.

I love GuideStar. I love the access it gives to tax-exempt organizations’ 990s, and all the information I can get from that. The one thing that has always kind of annoyed me, though, was that the 990s weren’t searchable. And that wasn’t Guidestar’s fault–it merely posted the 990s it received, which, I assume, the organizations didn’t provide in an OCR manner.

But now, ProPublica has provided a searchable database of 990s, going back as far as 2011. (Full-text search is herehere.) I don’t know the best way to use the database, but I did do a search for “Loyola University Chicago” to see whose 990s we show up in. Turns out about 304 990s mention us. (I say about because the search isn’t perfect: I couldn’t find Loyola mentioned in the DePaul Schedule I that came up in the search.) A lot of the mentions are from private foundations, or from matching grants. There’s even a mention in the 2010 Form 990 for the Charles Koch Foundation, though there the university is giving back about $1,200 in unused funds from a 2009 grant.

Samuel D. Brunson