{"id":13036,"date":"2010-05-17T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-17T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2010\/05\/17\/13036.html"},"modified":"2010-05-17T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-05-17T18:00:00","slug":"potentially-urgent-info-for-sm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2010\/05\/17\/potentially-urgent-info-for-sm\/","title":{"rendered":"Potentially urgent info for small nonprofits"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

An AP article<\/a> suggests that many small US nonprofits that make under $25,000 a year could (at least temporarily) lose their nonprofit status if they don't file a particular IRS form by today; the article says that a lot of organizations don't know they need to file the form.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, the IRS website has lots of info about form 990-N<\/a>, and as far as I can tell, things are not quite as disastrously bad as the article makes it sound. For example, organizations don't lose tax-exempt status unless they fail to file for three consecutive years.<\/p>\n

But I think that means that if you're the person who handles taxes for a small nonprofit and you've never filed this form, you need to do so today; if I understand the AP article right, this past year was the third tax year for which the form was required, so today may be your third strike. (However, I'm having a hard time finding details about whether today is really the third time or not.)<\/p>\n

At any rate, if you're a small tax-exempt organization, it can't hurt to file today. Filing is done electronically. Note that the server that handles the filing appears to be a little overloaded\/slow today.<\/p>\n

If you're not sure whether your organization has filed in past years, you can use the IRS's search form<\/a> to search for your organization's name.<\/p>\n

If you fail to file for three consecutive years and you lose your tax-exempt status, it is possible to get reinstated as a tax-exempt organization, but I think you have to re-apply (and re-pay the application fee), which would presumably be a big pain.<\/p>\n

For more info about all this, see the IRS's 990-N FAQ<\/a>, especially the FAQ item about automatic loss of tax-exempt status<\/a>; see also their 990-N educational tools<\/a> pages.<\/p>\n

And if you're not part of a small nonprofit but you know someone who is, might not be a bad idea to mention this to them.<\/p>\n

Btw, in case you're wondering, here's the info that the 990-N requires (and note that this all becomes public information):<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Organization's legal name<\/li>\n
  2. Any other names the organization uses<\/li>\n
  3. Organization's mailing address<\/li>\n
  4. Organization's website address, if it has one<\/li>\n
  5. Organization's employer identification number<\/li>\n
  6. Name and address of a principal officer of the organization<\/li>\n
  7. Organization's annual tax year<\/a><\/li>\n
  8. Answers to the following questions:\n
      \n
    • Are your gross receipts normally $25,000 or less?<\/li>\n
    • Has your organization terminated or gone out of business?<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      An AP article suggests that many small US nonprofits that make under $25,000 a year could (at least temporarily) lose…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-improving-society"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}