How can I ask questions about Form 990 filings?

What you can ask about

Questions can reach any field on any electronically filed return, for the filing years the IRS has released:

• Form 990 — the full return filed by most mid-size and large nonprofits, covering mission, programs, governance, compensation, and complete financial statements
• Form 990-EZ — the short form filed by smaller organizations
• Form 990-PF — the private foundation return, including investments, payout, and itemized grants
• The supporting schedules — public support tests (A), lobbying and political activity (C), endowments and donor-advised funds (D), foreign activities (F), fundraising events (G), hospital community benefit (H), domestic grants (I), executive compensation detail (J), transactions with insiders (L), noncash contributions (M), supplemental explanations (O), related organizations (R), and the rest

This is the complete return, not a selected set of headline numbers. If an organization reported something on a filed return, you can ask about it.

Where to ask

You can ask a question from three places:

Examples of questions

About one organization

• What did this organization report for total fundraising expenses in its latest filing?
• How many volunteers does it report, year by year, over the last decade?
• Does it have a conflict-of-interest policy, a whistleblower policy, and a document-retention policy on record?
• Was its financial statement audited, and did the audit surface any material weaknesses?

Deeper in the schedules

• How much does this university hold in donor-advised funds, and how much did it grant out of them?
• Did this organization report any lobbying spending in the last five years?
• List every loan, grant, or business transaction it reported with board members, officers, or their family members.

About foundations

• What was this foundation's payout ratio each year for the last five years?
• List every grant it reported, with recipient, amount, and stated purpose.
• Which foundations have funded this organization, and what else did those funders support?

Comparisons and trends

• Rank the 20 largest food banks by fundraising efficiency over the last three years.
• Show me animal shelters whose net assets declined three years in a row.
• What's the median executive director salary at community foundations, by asset size?

Getting a useful answer

State the group, the field, and the shape of the answer. For example: "For [group], show [field] for [years], as a ranking." The more specific the question, the more precise the answer.

Adjust the reasoning depth for harder questions. Standard works well for straightforward lookups. Deeper levels take longer and suit multi-step questions — for example, a sector-wide aggregation with several conditions.

Refine in the conversation. You can follow up rather than starting over: narrow the group, switch from an average to a median, or add a year range.

Where the answers come from

The IRS releases nonprofit returns as structured electronic data. Giving Compass ingests the complete returns — every part, every schedule, every field — organized by each organization's EIN and filing year.

Answers name the organization, the form, and the filing year the numbers came from, and link to the organization's profile, where you can look at the same filings yourself.

What isn't in the data

Paper-only filings from earlier years. Coverage is the IRS's released e-file data. Electronic filing has been required of all 990 filers since tax years beginning in 2019. Before that, many organizations e-filed voluntarily — coverage reaches back more than a decade — but a paper-only filing from those years may be missing or partial.

Donor names. Schedule B, which lists individual contributors, is redacted from public IRS releases. No source can name individual donors from public 990 data. Contribution totals are available, and grants reported by funders on their own 990-PF filings and Schedule I are often the more useful path.

Postcard filers. Organizations under the filing threshold submit the 990-N, which carries no financial detail. Questions about very small organizations may have little or no data to draw on.

Recent activity. Organizations file annually, often on extension, and IRS release adds further delay. Expect the newest data to be one to two years old.

Anything the organization didn't report accurately. The numbers are what organizations told the IRS. Giving Compass structures the data; it doesn't audit it. Amended returns can also revise previously filed figures.

Free accounts can see every data source described in full, including what each one doesn't cover.

Troubleshooting

I asked about a small local charity and got nothing back. Organizations under the filing threshold file the 990-N postcard, which contains no financial fields. Others may be behind on filing, or their newest return may not have been released by the IRS yet.

The number doesn't match what's on the organization's website. Answers reflect what the organization filed with the IRS for a specific fiscal year. Websites often cite a different period, a consolidated group of entities, or unaudited figures. Ask which form and filing year the number came from, then compare like with like.

Some data sources show a Pro label. The nonprofit directory and Charity Navigator ratings are available to everyone. The deeper filing sources — full financials and trends, leadership and pay, grants, programs, and schedule-level detail — are part of a Pro subscription.