 When we think about nonprofits, probably a lot of folks on this call think about the biggest ones that you're familiar with, organizations like the United Way, St. Jude's, Children's Research Hospital, the Savage and Army, or Goodwill Industries. But nonprofits are, there are many, many, many more nonprofits than just the largest ones. And in fact, they're all around us. And they're not just organizations that we typically refer to nonprofits like 501C3 organizations, which tend to be religious and educational, charitable and scientific. Those are the public charities. But in fact, there are many, many different types of nonprofits. I'm just going to share a list in the chat with you, but these include veterans organizations, black long benefit trusts, cemetery companies, teachers, retirement funds, social and recreational clubs and civic leagues and local organizations like the Chamber of Commerce. All of these organizations operate under a section of the tax code in which they are exempt from paying certain taxes in exchange for serving the public good. And in many cases, people who make donations to organizations, particularly 501C3s are able to deduct those donations from their taxes for helping the public good. When we think about nonprofits, they fall within a space that on the one hand you have public organizations like a government agency, a government run hospital, or you may have a for profit company, some of which are publicly traded, and all of which have different types of organization that's information that's released on them for public organizations. Of course, you can use public records laws to get information about their finances, what they pay their staff and their executives and their budgets. And for for profit companies that are publicly traded, they have responsibilities to release this information to this public enter the securities and exchange commission. For nonprofits, we have a unique window into what they spend their money on as well as what they collect through a form called the 990 form. And many of you on this call may have seen a 990 form may have used a 990 form, but the 990 form is an annual filing by nonprofits that details a whole host of information. And it's going to look a little bit different depending on what the type of nonprofit is and what they do. We're going to talk a bit about this today, but it's a once in a year opportunity to understand how these organizations work. So unlike a publicly traded company where you make it quarterly reports for nonprofits, you get a single annual report that is often released months after the close of its fiscal year. And sometimes nonprofit organizations can seek extensions to release those. So it could be many months after the close of their fiscal year. They have to file these with the IRS. Some put it on their website. Some don't. But our nonprofit explorer attempts to provide information on these 990s in that you can find in one place and you'll hear more about that today. What type of information can you find on a 990 form? Well, first of all, you could find top line financials on the organization, not only their revenue and expenses, but also their assets and liabilities. So you can look at an organization's financial stability in a couple of different ways and it's all broken down into relatively granular level of detail. So you can find out, for example, how much a nonprofit spends on lobbying. How much a nonprofit spends on advertising and promotion. How much a nonprofit spends on legal fees. You could also learn about their board members and key employees, as well as salary information. This is often a top use of a 990 form is to find out who sits on somebody's board and what do the top executives earn at that nonprofit. It's once a year information and it is included in the nonprofit. You can find information about the grants that are given by the nonprofit organization. So whoever they give money to, you're able to find out by looking at the 990, you're not able to see who they get money from. They file with the IRS, something called a scheduled B, which includes their donors, but those that list is not mandated by the IRS to be public. Some nonprofits, including ProPublica, do make it public, but others, most of them do not. There's also interesting tidbits that you could find out. You could find out, for example, about conflicts of interest within a nonprofit, as well as whether or not a nonprofit includes first class travel or charter flights for their executives. And I know we're going to show you some of that in a bit. You could also find something called the contractors that a nonprofit works with that are included as well on their 990 form. There are some organizations, charitable organizations that do not have to file nonprofits. So, for example, churches or religious organizations do not have to file a 990 form. There are also some other exemptions like state institutions and other types of religious groups that don't have to file a 990 form and Connor may be able to share that link as well in the chat. The last point I wanted to make is the type of information you can find out on a 990 schedules, which are documents that are included in the 990 form. So, for example, if a nonprofit runs a hospital, they have to include what's called a schedule H as with their 990 form. If they run a school, they have to include what's called a schedule E with their 990 form. There are other types of schedules that will be included if they apply. So if a nonprofit does business with people who are their executives or family members of their executives or members of their board, they have to file what's called a schedule L form. And if nonprofits have information, work with telemarketers, they also have to file forms that include information on how much they receive from those marketing activities and how much they pay for those marketing activities. So that's a brief overview on nonprofits and 990 forms. And I'm going to one more thing, which is how often they come out. So nonprofits file their 990s, as I mentioned, once a year, but different nonprofits operate at different fiscal years, which close at different times. And so not all forms are released at one time in a year, depending on when a fiscal year closes. Several months after that fiscal year closes is when that 9, when that nonprofits 990 will become public, but you can't necessarily expect it just because you get one on a particular day. All the rest will be available on that day. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Andrea to walk us through the new nonprofit Explorer. So thanks. Thanks Charlie. I am going to pop up a quick screen share and we're just going to run through a bunch of the kind of features and some of tricks to navigating a 990. So some of this, you know, you may have encountered before hopefully some of these things will be new to you because they're pretty new to the site. So this is the homepage of nonprofit Explorer. Hopefully you've seen it before. And one of the things that we've added in recent months is this little breakdown by state, which will link you over to state page that summarizes the nonprofits in your state. So, you know, if you're curious about what what the largest revenue nonprofits in your state are if you're a state or local reporter interested in kind of understanding the nonprofit landscape in your state. I think this can be a good way to kind of get a little bit of information on that. We will give you a count of the total active organizations that we know of operating in New York. In this case, including those 501 C threes which Charlie mentioned that's the really broad umbrella of charitable organizations. Those are probably the organizations that you're getting giving Tuesday emails from asking for donations today and tomorrow. So, and those are also the, that's the most common subsection of nonprofits, but it's also, you know, it's it's a really broad umbrella, and they can accept tax exempt or tax deductible donations. So, so that's a really common status that you're going to see. So we're going to give you the top the highest revenue nonprofits in New York here and then be highest earning nonprofit employees from the most recent filing for each organization. And one thing that really like jumps out to me on this page is that typically the top earning employees are going to be hospital from hospitals universities. In this case we're seeing the Museum of Natural History and so and $11 million in compensation and so to me that's that's sort of, I'm going to ask a question. What's going on here. Is that normal. Is that what museum and natural history is paying their executive or their president every year. And to figure that out. I'm just going to hop over to our people search at the top here. You should be able to access that search from any page and luckily Ellen Flutter has a very distinctive name so we're probably going to find her in here. So this is, this is sort of all. I mean, sort it from newest to oldest filing. So we can kind of see and then we can filter by compensation so I'm actually going to. It looks like she's on a bunch of boards, we don't necessarily kind of, we don't want to see the boards we want to see her job. I'm just going to filter out those those low, low compensation ones. And here we're just going to get that her compensation over the years at the Museum of Natural History. And we can see that she's earning like ballpark $1 million per year, going pretty far back until 2022. And so the, the thing that I'm going to do. I'm going to notice that is just look at the filing and see if there's additional information. So one thing you'll notice on this filing page. And one question that comes up very frequently is, so we just clicked into the 2022 filing. And I think says 2021. And that is because this number is the version of the filing that it's basically an internal, an internal reference for the IRS, so that they know that you know the forms change from year to year. So for the IRS, they want to know like what specific version of the form, what questions were on that form. If there's, you know, if a question wording changes from year to year. This is going to tell them internally what questions this organization has answered. This is not the fiscal year sometimes it lines up sometimes it doesn't. So what we're going to use across the site and what is sort of typical in in accounting is the tax year end. And in this case, the Museum of Natural History does accounting from July to June. So we're going to reference this filing as the 2020 filing filing because this tax year ended in June 2022. So if you ever notice a discrepancy between the years that are referenced across site or, you know, elsewhere on the internet. Then maybe what's going on. And so this is always going to be the number to look for some organizations use the calendar year and so that's just going to be December 2022 but in this case it's June 2022. This is also one reason why we can't always line up organizations back to back you know if an organization says they gave a grant to another organization in this fiscal year. That organization might have a different accounting calendar and so they may have received it in a separate fiscal year. That's just something to pay attention to as you're going through a 990. And the other thing that we get a lot of requests for our is the ability to download a filing so you can save it to your research folder. We, we typically post PDF versions of filings, however those come from the IRS and IRS is about a year and a half behind on releasing PDF filings right now, due to apparently some technical issues. What we've done instead is these are this is electronic data that we're rendering into into visual format. It's an HTML document, which means you can, you know, you can copy and paste out of it and search it. So if you use this little print, I'm not sure if you can see the pop up here in the screen share but if you use the little print button, you will, you will you should get your browser's print menu and you'll get a save as PDF option in the printer and so that's a way that you can just save that full file to your desktop or, you know, your research folder and then you just have a copy of that filing, and you don't keep you don't have to keep coming back to nonprofit Explorer. Okay, so back on task we were looking for Ellen Futter's compensation and that is on, I just happened to know this page seven of the 990. We can see that here we see the same number. This is the table that we pull that people data off of and that's going to include key employees which are people in leadership roles people who are highly paid people who are officers and board members and trustees. And so you'll get sort of anyone who falls into these specific IRS definitions. But you'll always get the board members, and then you'll get, you know, whatever administrators fall into the key employee category. But we don't get a whole lot of additional information here. And this is, this is where the schedules come into play. So, as Charlie mentioned, there are a lot of different schedules different organizations file different schedules, a lot of large organizations file schedule J. And we can see that this organization did file schedule J in this year. And then we're going to hop down to the compensation table which is very similar to the first one but has more detail and we can actually see here that the that her compensation was about a million dollars, kind of consistent with prior years, and then there's other reportable compensation of $10 million. And I'm going to peek down at the supplemental information section. This is often where an organization will explain what's going on there. So if you have a question you're like this, this looks strange. In this case this organization, you know, the Museum of Natural History says Ellen served as president for 30 years, she retired in this fiscal year. They received deferred compensation, which they also note here. The deferred amounts were reported annually, as they were deferred are now reported again this is this is sort of, this is sometimes how executives get like retirement compensation. There are sometimes other scenarios where there will be a bunch of extra pay. And last year someone served. They might have had a bonus kind of consistent with however many years they serve, they might have had a severance pay out. And usually, there will be an explanation, either in the supplemental information, or in schedule, oh, which is the general supplemental information schedule for the whole 9090. That's my little rabbit hole, which and the moral of the story is always read the supplemental information, and if a number looks strange, don't report it immediately. Do a little more research, see if you can figure out, you know, if there's other context there. And another caveat is that sometimes this data is really messy. These are, it's humans filling out these forms. If you leave off a decimal accidentally reported salary might go from $34,000 a year to 3.4 million. And if that doesn't look right, it might be a mistake. So, again, and organizations can file amended returns. So if you go to your organization's page, which we can do over here, we will always in that tax year. The link that we're going to show is a link to the most recent document we have will also provide links to the other prior versions that we have. But if a number doesn't look right, it may also have been amended and we do index every filing in our search. So, so it might show up in search, but it might be from an earlier version of that file. So, again, a little bit of caution, let's just directly interpreting 990 data. Okay, so now we're on the Museum of Natural History's main organization page. I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview where it is how long it's been tax exempt, and the employer identification number in the same way that, you know, if you're, you know, if you're filing taxes you have a social security number. Employers have an EIN and employer identification number. If you're looking for information about this organization on another site, if you're requesting it from the IRS, this is the number that you're going to want to grab. A lot of nonprofits have really similar names, but this is the unique identifier for this organization. And again, we're going to give you a little bit of information. This is a 501c3 so you can make a tax deductible donation. And we're going to pull out some revenue information so that you can get an idea of, you know, what does this organization, what do this organization's finances look like over time. And then jumping down, we will give you for, if we have an electronic filing for an organization, we can actually extract the financial data for that filing. And so we will show you kind of some drill downs of that organization's finances for that year. You can always get more when you click into the filing. And then that employee and officer information that we pull off of page seven of the 990 or different page if it's the 990 easy or the 990 PF, which different forms, different pages. Always fun to navigate IRS data. And then you can kind of scroll back to prior years and see, again, that drill down of what's a little more detail on the finances of this organization. And one thing I'll note here is that we, if we have any filing we can tell you when it was filed when the organization filed it with the IRS. And so you can see June 2022 is when this organization's when the Museum and Natural History's fiscal year ended. They filed nearly a year after, after that tax period ended organizations by default have five months to file a 990 after, after their tax year ends, but they can file for an extension. They can file within a couple months, some file up to especially larger organizations may take a year to file or more, and then there's some processing time when after submitting to the IRS before the IRS releases that document to us. So there's going to be, you know, we're always working on a delay with 990 data. And if you want to know what the Museum and Natural History's finances look like in the fiscal year 2023. That year has already ended, but we're probably not going to see that filing on nonprofit Explorer until I'm going to guess June, July, August of next year, depending on how quickly the IRS turns out around, we can kind of see. Usually filing around mid May. So that looks pretty consistent. So we're probably going to get this filing next summer sometime. And if you don't want to keep checking back on nonprofit Explorer, this is my favorite new feature and one that I am using quite a bit already. You can hit subscribe. And you'll be subscribed to email alerts when we post the new filing. And so I'm already logged in, you'll get a little log in confirmation just so we're not like spamming people accidentally. But I'm not subscribed, I'll get an email when we post a new filing for the Museum and Natural History was probably going to be about once a year, though they do also file audits because they spend federal grant money. So that might, you may be getting a notification twice a year. We'll notify for both of those types of filings. We'll go over and manage those subscriptions here. So I can see I am opted into Museum and Natural History filings, I'll get an email. The next time we add a filing for this organization. Okay, so the next section of this very, very quick run through. I'm going to hop back to the homepage. I know there are a lot of power users of nonprofit Explorer. And one of the things that we've gotten asked a lot is what are the like Boolean search terms how do you do and or or strict search. And we have added a little cheat sheet for you so that you can drop down this advanced search box and just see, you know, if you surround something by quotes, it'll be a strict search. If you use the plus it'll be and so you can do you can kind of refine your searches, a little bit more. And then the other big search thing that is new is that you can actually just hit search. And you will get to a page where you're just, if you don't put anything in the search box you get to a page where you're just browsing all organization. So here I can, and it's going to be sorted by revenue by default. So you're going to see the biggest organizations. I can drill down if I'm interested in a particular state I live in Vermont I might want to see all the Vermont organizations. I can kind of filter by revenue see, you know, some specific organizations that that fit into those revenue brackets by category. So other filters this is something where and there are a couple things here that Charlie mentioned. We have pulled out if an organization said it operated a donor by its fund this is a way that organization that people foundations can sort of allocate money to an organization that then distributes money to different organizations. It's something that's been reported on quite a bit recently if you just want to see everyone who said yes I operate a donor right but it's fun on their most recent filing. You can filter there if you want to see everyone who said I operated hospital I operate a school, you can use that filter. You can also find just every organization that reported an excess benefit transaction on their most recent filing. That's because the nonprofit. Nobody's supposed to make make a profit off of this organization but if you know if someone sort of imbeciles money from the organization if you know contractors overpaid if some if the organization ends up paying above market rent to it. If someone who's involved with running the organization. That's going to be that's going to be considered an excess benefit transaction someone made a profit off of this, you know, tax exempt organization, and the organization is required to report it immediately upon discovering that transaction. We actually just see every organization that said yes we discovered a an excess benefit transaction, we click into one of these organizations. We'll see, we'll see that information pulled out right at the top, and then there's going to be a little bit more information, and we're going to tell you exactly where to find more information so you can click into that filing. We'll head to schedule L and read about what happened. Why this organization is recording that. And then lastly, we've gotten, we got a lot of questions about finding those finding donors to an organization and again schedule be is redacted. So, you know unless that organization voluntarily releases that schedule be. Or if it's a, some private foundations don't get scheduled be redacted so you can find some data in nonprofit Explorer but usually you're just going to see restricted, if you click into a schedule be. But we can find organizations that said I gave a grant to a nonprofit. We're just actually going to throw in non pro public as EIN. Once again that EIN is really useful for finding organizations. We can see this brings up pro publica. We can also click over to the full text and filings which you can, which we index if we have an electronic filing will will let you search everything that was on that filing. And I know that schedule I is the grants table and so I'm just going to filter to schedule I sort that by new to old filing here. And I can get like a pretty good idea of what organizations said we gave a grant to pro publica. What is going to capture is the 990 pf which private foundations file. There's no field for the EIN on that form, unfortunately. And so we have to do a tech search for the organization name instead. You'll notice that pro publica has a space in its name, technically. And so this is where we can actually do that Boolean search so I'm going to just search for find those private foundations that said hey I gave money to search for pro publica and or that's the war pro publica with a space. Search. And then again I just want private foundations because I already got the 990 grants table. We're getting 1000 some matches for pro publica this is obviously it's like, we have a pretty distinctive name. So this is going to be a little bit harder if you have an organization that has a really common name if they're frequent typos or, you know, or abbreviations. But that is one way to kind of track down any organization that's mentioning an organization in their filing, which can be really useful information to have. And then the last thing I want to touch on. It's been a very quick tour is if you scroll to the bottom. You can actually get a link to all of the data that we use to populate nonprofit explorer we get a lot of questions about, you know, can I just get a list of every, every active nonprofit in my state. And you can get that through example organization profiles the IRS uploads that data file with a breakdown for specific states every month. So that's a really useful thing to know about if you're looking to dig into the data yourself you can also get everything else that we use to populate nonprofit explorer at various places, most of it from the IRS. And I am going to stop my share. And pass off to Kent. So that was extremely comprehensive and short order and I really appreciate that. I am also going to share my screen okay I find sometimes a, I find myself a lot of the time when I'm reading the news, I will go back and if I see something about a nonprofit doing something wrong, I will go back and see if they could find, you know, essentially the crime on the 90. And so I'm just going to walk you through one of what I think is sort of the easier ones to understand, which was a story in the New York Times in 2021, not one of David stories I'm sorry David but you will talk about yours I'm sure very soon about an executive at a nonprofit I meant on the house of homeless, who was bringing in a million dollars a year, hiring family members, and had created several companies that he was then directing funds toward. And I believe the city and the state have stopped working with that nonprofit. And so I am just going to share my screen here much like Andrea. This is the story here. If you go in and you read it, you read about this man Jack Brown the third. And you see right at the top, a couple of facts, the city award more than $352 million to nonprofits run by Mr Brown. It had channel contracts worth 32 million and for profit companies tied to him, allowing him to earn more than a million dollars a year. Millions more have gone to real estate companies in which he has ownership interest, and that he has hired family members and given them perks and further down here. It says in addition to serving as the chief executive of the nonprofit, I called core services group and I will just copy and paste that so I will show you how I do this. Mr Brown started a security guard, company that polices shelters a maintenance company that makes repairs in them, and a catering company that feeds the residents. He heads each of those collecting a total compensation that tops a million dollars needs the highest page shelter operator in New York for an interview available records. And so when I read something like this, I will immediately go and grab the name of the nonprofit, and I will put it into our handy dandy search interface right here. As Maria said, and I will just reiterate, we can search three different things on nonprofits or you can search the name of a nonprofit. And to answer a couple questions, if you want to search for a city, if you put a city in here. So for example, I am from Boca Raton, Florida. This will pull up nonprofits within Boca Raton, as well as that as well as that had it in the name, but that will help you find nonprofits for the city. And I see two, but I saw this was just called core services group. And that was what was named in the New York Times piece. I'm going to keep note of this one for later though and I'm going to pop this open. And, you know, as again, Andrea showed you, we have some information here to 501 C three, here's the revenue expenses assets and liabilities over time. I'm actually just going to go ahead and subscribe, because I am actually interested with the next one of these those. And we have a couple of information pieces of information we pulled out saying that they've reported conflicts of interest transactions, which seems like potentially an understatement to what the time story said, you can pop right in here and you can see, you know, it's interface the quick top line financials, and you can see right here, Jack Brown, who was mentioned the story, and you can kind of add this up into your head and it's close to a million dollars but not quite. But this was a story that was published in 2021 so it's actually the 2020 filing. If you get here again it's close but not quite but we'll just poke around. And we'll see what we can find. So just when I take a look at this I, the quick note of the address 45 Main Street in Brooklyn, not too far from where I live. Sometimes I'll read through the summary to see what it says. There are the sort of more top line financials kind of similar to the ones we've extracted, but I just kind of want to jump, jump down and see if I can work backwards to see how the times did this. And then you is going to take note of these monetary amounts, and this looks to be about 800 and some 1000 which is close. But I'm betting that they found more information on that that's still a lot of money to pay a nonprofit executive, and that if I were a reporter which I am with paying my senses and I would be interested in learning more about that amount of money. And I'm also going to pop down to the independent contractor second because I do remember where it said that he had created companies that he then paid themselves through. And one thing, you know I wish I could pull the class on this. Oops, I accidentally changed the size of the font. But I wish I could pull the class to see if anybody could name. What about these three nonprofits seem to stand or these three companies appear to stand out to you. Anybody. It is that they all share the same address that that would be married are really, really hard. If you look up who runs all these companies in any sort of state attorney general database or secretary of state database, you would see that he is the principal of the company. And also it's listed further down on the forum that he is the principal of these companies. And you can see that they have directed $18 million. Again, as the story said for security, $3 million for food distribution, and about a quarter of million dollars the property management. And they are very lead items in the story and they are just right here for the taking for anybody who would want to review these forms. You know, it also said that there was conflicts of interest transactions. And I know that that's on schedule L we also write over where we say that we say it's on schedule well so you'll know where you can click. So you click right here to schedule well. You can also just be interested in like poking around a little bit more into those conflicts of interest that they've listed. You can see that they're that they are a subsidiary of a company called core companies Inc, which I do not 100% know what that is, and that there is a loan from that company to here. And you can also see some of these companies that were listed earlier that core development company LC is owned by an officer of the organization. Again, we can look up the records of that company in a state database and see who owns that company. And you can see all these various companies, including this one right here, which is somebody's brother who is making $175,000 in conversation. So there's one thing that's nagging to me, and I don't know where that $1 million came from there's two possibilities that I can see one of them is if we go into core services group and why Inc. It turns out that this is also owned by Jack Brown, a nonprofit also owned by Jack Brown, where he is making $182,000. Most recently, but in the year they wrote this $210,000. I am pretty sure that if you add up the $800,000 from the main nonprofit and the $200,000 from this one, that would equal up to about a million dollars. It's also, and maybe David or Andrea, you know the answer to this, it feels like this one should be listed as a related entity on the nonprofit, but it is not. So it's the finances here are not actually reported. His salary here is not reported on the main nonprofit. So, very quickly, I have like read the story, and I have gone back through here, and I have found several of the items in the lead of the story, just from reading it. And I know that like journalism is significantly harder than that, right, like somebody had to have a tip, probably, right, or a guest that they should be doing this. And the story is full of fantastic details about moldy bacon and things like that that you can only get up on the ground interviews, but just from reading these documents and using sort of the nonprofit Explorer tools that give you hints and leads into finding these sort of related companies. And if you would search his name through the name search, it would have pulled up other companies that he's listed in, although Jack Brown is not the most uncommon name. Then you can see how you can start building up a basis for doing more reporting. And on that note, on the basis of doing more reporting, we have this video grandpa here from the New York Times whose beat is covering nonprofits. And David. Thank you. Did you want to start off with anything you want to just be here is a small measure of my gratitude or the many, many hours I've spent using nonprofit Explorer I think which I'll do is it's the best thing out there so and I use it all the time every day. What's the weirdest thing you've ever seen on 990. I mean, I have to go back to the Trump foundation that so that that was the first nonprofit I covered with Donald Trump's foundation. And we, in our course of our reporting found all kinds of weird things he'd use the nonprofits money to buy like a Tempebo football helmet some portraits of himself, which they had not listed as assets even though they were they were charitable assets. After our reporting then we the next year in the 990 we got like signed Tempebo helmet portrait of Donald Trump. All the things were listed as charitable assets, although we still don't know where they are. They ended up on on Trump's 990 so I think I'll have to say that. When you go and when you start like researching a company right I mean I guess the first question would be like in your process. I assume you're not just delving through 990s all the time but maybe you are what what is sort of your process from getting like from sort of like a tip to getting into the 990 and then once you get to what are the first things you look at. One of the dumbest, but most useful things I can recommend reporters do on on any deep and not the nonprofit be particularly is to use Google alerts I use that as like a sort of a, you know, a regular sort of feed of things that might be interested I have Google alerts for nonprofit arrests and nonprofit convicted you know, and any other specific topics that I'm interested in with nonprofits. I can type whether it's through that from another reporter, just from a source, the non the nine nineties are where I start. So the first thing I do when I'm sort of digging into a nonprofit story is, well there's two things the first thing is to take the 990s that I can find and make a spreadsheet make a spreadsheet to track the key, you know, read the 90s obviously but you're making a spreadsheet to track changes in revenue changes and spending changes in personnel over time, you know, so many of what we care about the things we care about with nonprofits begin with financial gain or financial distress, so to be able to understand how their finances change over time, how their people change over time. It's just to look, look through those 90s 90s to look for changes over time, but also just try to sort of map the organization is this just one standalone group with a small set of people in charge of it or is it, you know, part of a web of things, you know, sometimes you know that going in if you're looking at a hospital or university. Sometimes it's surprising to find what looks like a small organization has links to other groups and it gives all its money to one particular group or at lists. Other groups is related organization so I make that spreadsheet track those factors over time, and then that gives me sort of a story, you know, a list of things that I'm interested that then I go to a Google Doc and I write down, you know, what are the questions that I'm interested in answering what are the things that stuck out on the 9090 that I want to learn more about. The other thing I do right at the beginning, and this is, you can do this if you only have a week because it takes a little time but if you have longer than that, or you think you're going to be covering the nonprofit for a long period of time is to go to the IRS and FOIA their most recent for the, what they call the IRS form 1023, which is the form that nonprofits have to file when they when they seek tax exemption. You can't get that sadly on nonprofit Explorer but you can get it by sending a form to the IRS. It takes about a month or month and a half. And sometimes that tells you things that the 9090s won't tell you. But at the beginning of the process, then you know, okay, is there a story here, you know the people you want to call and you know the sort of trends and mysteries you want to solve. Please know that we have attempted to get 10.3 in bulk, and I'm just the vein of several records officers at the IRS, because of this request, and she has to get the SD card full of one month of 1023 is probably for the rest of her life. So we have no idea what more lover get, get more of that. I just got one today, it's in my mailbox. When you go through, and you're trying to make these connections right like, I know I have done this and I have ended up in like, crazy person land where I've like, I've drawn the strings on the wall, and I like I know there's something there and it's just like driving me crazy. I mean, get yourself, how do you keep yourself from like, getting too deep into the sort of conspiracy theorists, you know, section of like networking nonprofits together. Well, I guess there's two main ways. The one is that, you know, you're not, you're trying to look for a closed loop, like, you know, when we talk about an organization that's like interconnected in a way that's interesting to us. There's a set of nonprofits that from the outside appear independent, but in reality only deal with each other. So we had a story earlier this year about this group that was funding this, there was a rich philanthropist in the US who was sending money into a network of US nonprofits that then send it out to groups that all funded basically Chinese propaganda pro Chinese propaganda. So it was a chain of groups him to a, to a private foundation to a couple of 501 C sixes to a couple of 501 C threes. If you looked at the from the outside to any one of those individually they all seem to be independent. But when you started looking at them more you realize, oh wait, this group gets all its money only from these two other groups, you know, this group only gives its money to these two other groups. If you start finding that situation where you're in a closed loop where every the organ, you know, there's four or five groups or however many groups that only deal with each other or primarily deal with each other or they share people addresses, you know, you know, the there's any sort of signs of that overlap, then you're on to something but right, you don't want to get in a situation where you're you're you're trying to trying to sort of make causality out of what may be sort of casual connections or the fact that a group, maybe, you know, these two groups in the field. That's sort of the way to do it with documents the other way is if you're concerned about, you know, trying to get a reality check on whether you found conspiracy or just found some coincidences. That's when you have to start talking to people I mean the document these documents are great and that's what I love about nonprofit reporting is the documents will take you so far, but at some point you got to start calling the people and find out, you know, a certain asking questions about what they know and obviously then it's just the sort of standard reporting trick of imagining concentric circles and calling the people in the outermost circle first meaning people who are the least connected to the people at the center and the least likely to sort of snitch on you to them. And if you start calling those people, you know ex employees, you know, sort of extraneous employees people that have some connection but not are not central, and they say, oh yeah there's a connection we all go to the same retreats we all go to the same board meetings, then you know you're on to something but they may tell you know it's just a coincidence. That makes a lot of sense. And there are a couple of questions I think based off of some of you said which is, you said that the IRS response employee request within two months but I think what you meant was the IRS will respond to this like specific form request for a 1023 within about an under the you get about the same rate about a month or two for that. Yeah, I would say like six weeks, and they usually fulfill it on paper. So you get a big packet in the mail. So this is this is actually really important distinction the IRS for whatever reason does not like the word for you. If you say for you to the IRS actually they've never heard it before. What they what you want is a form 4506 B and someone hopefully somebody can put the link into that into the chat a form 4506 B, you fill that out, and you send it in by email, or you can fax it or the fax machine hasn't been working. They're fax machine not mine. You can you send that in and that is, it's like a FOIA request but it's to them it's a it's not a FOIA request and they will send it back on paper by mail within six weeks or two months. Yeah, and there are some people who are worried about the nonprofit finding out that you've submitted a request to the IRS for that my understanding. I'm going to ask both of you, they don't get notified the IRS to mix copy and send it to you right. I've never had had that happen. No. Yeah. And the, the one other thing people may want to know about documents to is, you know, it takes a while actually much faster for us to get 990s. And lately, again, we've seen them get filed and us get them like month and a half to two months later which is sort of unheard of speed. But speaking of forms you can file with the IRS you can ask the IRS for a copy of the 990 if we don't have it and you think it's been filed, but also you can ask the nonprofit itself in the nonprofit by law, though I don't know if there are any teeth to that law, must give you a copy of the 990 if they are filed is that right. Yes, and what I this is a useful thing if the nonprofits sort of, you know, if you're not worried about giving away your, you know, if you think there's some element of surprise you need to preserve with the people you're reporting about. Don't do this but if the people that already know you're there or that you don't care if they know you're out there, you've passed that point in your reporting. If you file them and you cite, I'm sorry to throw another number of people but section 6104 of the tax code you say under 61 section 6104 of the tax code. You know you were required to provide copies of the three most recent 990s and your IRS form 1023 upon request so I'm requesting it. So if you have any, you know, like, what's asking questions about what your stories about or, you know, there's no leeway in this and then I that's what you write back and say like there's no, you know, you don't get to decide there's no, the section 6104 does not make any provision for you to screen this if I asked for it you have to give it to me. And I should one more thing about that. Sometimes I always recommend doing that at some point with even if you think you've already got the 990, because sometimes if you do that they will screw up and send you the 990 with the schedule be the donors attached. So, like, that doesn't always happen, but it's happened to me enough that it's worth doing so, even if you already have a 990 ask for it anyway and maybe you'll get lucky and they'll send you the one with the donors. That is true. I just wrote a daily B story recently believe that though if you had reversed search some of that and I'm public for you would have found it anyway. I think we have time for just a few questions. I hate to interrupt your questions. Ken, do you have one more that you want to ask? I was going to ask David if there's anything else you want to leave folks with. Okay, sources, any, any tips or tricks or anything like that you want to leave folks with. My one other tip is that sometimes state level state so many states have charity registration databases along with the IRS and there are a few that post them a lot faster and sometimes post new other better information. In the, you know, more detailed information than the IRS requires, I particularly recommend the Hawaii Attorney General and the New Mexico Attorney General their charity searches. Even if your charity is not based in one of those states, if it operates, it's like a national charity and operates in one of those states. We got great stuff on project very toss ones from like think the Hawaii Attorney General. So keep those in your, in your repertoire because sometimes you'll get stuff from them you can't get anywhere else. And I know Charlie the on the questions I do see a question here that someone asked that feels like we did not really quite talk about which is with the best way to check nonprofits before donating. And we sort of talk a lot about investigator reporting which is what we all do and therefore where our brains go as we do this. Like a Charlie or Andrea or David if you have thoughts on the best sort of spots in nonprofits for or the 998 to check before you donate to a number. Well, I guess that there's a lot of a lot of things you should check before you donate to a group but the best things to look at when you're looking at a 992 are. Look at how they spend their money on the first page of the 998 shows you what do they do with the money that they bring in that they spend it on salaries for their employees they give it to other groups. And then you can scroll down to the things Andre has been talking about looking at salaries okay that they spend 80% of their salary on one person. Do they, you know, what do they pay their executives, and then at the very end of the 992 you can see the groups they've given their money to put in there there should be some description of both what they spend their money on and then you can get some is this in a charity that's how to enrich itself or enrich its contractors or is it is the money going out the door to help other people. They can always lie and there's some, there's some opacity in these 90s make it hard to be sure. But if somebody is grossly wasting money or spending all the money on fundraising and overhead. You can see that on the 90s. And just to say one thing which is that it just because they spend a lot of money on salaries doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad nonprofit for public spends over half of its money on salaries but we're a news organization. And so our job is to spend it on people and support. That was exactly what I was going to say. So, sometimes, if, if, you know, a site is calculating like the overhead percentage for an organization, like it's worth thinking about what is this organization's surface as well because if that is mostly salaries, then, you know, that's additional nuance to the one number that they might be showing. All right, well, let's dive into a few questions, which is, anybody can take this which is, what does the IRS do to review nine, you know, to review nonprofits, are they consistently reviewing 90s that are submitted and do they revoke nonprofit tax exam statuses based on investigations of, or red flags is this common. I can take that the IRS does, I does not audit, the question is, do they as the IRS audit every group know the audit rate is extremely small it's in a single digit, single digit percentage, and they do sometimes revoked tax exam status for violations but that's also extremely rare so that there's, you know, there's more than a million nonprofits active in the US and very very few of them get audited even fewer get revoked. I would find that the bulk of the charity enforcement the people who are either looking for bad and misleading nonprofits are more often the state level regulators like attorneys general than the IRS. And most commonly right if you're if you have your tax, your nonprofit status revoked is because you haven't filed 990s over a number of years right. That's by far the most common reason I think if you have to file for three if you don't file for three years they automatically revoke. Yeah, and if you actually the IRS is organization search which you can again search by by EIN, they will tell you if this organization has gotten automatically revoked. So that's a useful search tool. So it is very behind on filings right now. So when nonprofits file their 990 forms, are they obligated to provide proof of usage of the funds toward their mission so do they have to show their receipts. That's not something that gets submitted to the IRS but if an organization gets audited then that does happen I believe there's much more request for a paper trail. But the 990 is the primary tax documents that organizations are filing there are a couple of supplemental forms that don't get released publicly. Generally, as not a tax expert. I don't believe that there's, you know, any sort of drilled down accounting that people need to submit. So Andrea several people were curious about churches using religious exemptions and and hospitals and you know, could we talk about sort of churches using religious exemptions you in fact talked about a nonprofit, turning into a church you wrote about then so talk about sort of churches vis a vis filings. Sure yeah and and this is this is an area where they're they're the majority of organizations that you're going to stumble upon a nonprofit explorer actually have no filings ever. And sometimes that's because they're so small that they file a 990 and they make less than a certain threshold of revenue. And that in the IRS is tax exempt organization search. We don't currently import that that's one of my hopes for for the long term. But yeah so there are a lot of very, very small charities that that don't have to file every year. And then, or just have to file a hey we're still operating form. And then there's another bucket which is religious organizations churches and religious auxiliaries. And churches are definition, definitionally a 501 C3 so they are, they are automatically a charitable organization. They do not even have to apply to the IRS. They don't have to say hey we're operating. There are a lot of really small churches across the US. And so I think, you know, the rationale that it would be very onerous for like a small church that had the congregation of 50 to have to like apply to the IRS to get recognized. So many of those organizations are presumed to be tax exempt, but do not show up in our database do not file an application to the IRS. And churches and religious auxiliaries are not required to file a 990. Some do voluntarily. And some do actually, you know, the, the story I reported on the family research council. I think last year was about the organization sort of applying to switch from being a standard 501 C3 to religious organization that didn't have to file they are still filing voluntarily, but they're no longer required to do so. So that is that is one of the sort of areas where you know there there is a very large subset of organizations that are technically tax exempt. And you're not going to find a lot of information about them on nonprofit explorer, just by virtue of how how the tax code is written.