IRS Form 990: An Illustrated Tutorial

Introduction

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The tutorial on the following pages looks at each page and Schedules A and B of the 2004 Form 990. Form 990 is an information return that tax-exempt organizations with incomes of more than $25,000 must file annually with the Internal Revenue Service. (Note: Most faith-based organizations are not required to file Form 990, although some do so voluntarily.)

A nonprofit's return can provide abundant information about the organization's activities and finances. At first glance, however, it can be difficult to determine which entries are most enlightening and what the information they contain means.

More than 771,000 of the nation's 1.5 million tax-exempt organizations file Form 990, 990-EZ, or 990-PF with the IRS. GuideStar receives images of these returns directly from the IRS and posts them on our Web site. We also digitize the information from thousands of the 990s and present it in the organizations' GuideStar Reports. (You must be a GuideStar Premium subscriber to access digitized financial data.) Our digitization process is 99.9 percent accurate.

The explanations in the tutorial focus on returns filed by public charities and are taken from Understanding the IRS Form 990, by Chuck McLean, GuideStar's vice president for research. For links to other resources on using and understanding Form 990, go to our Form 990 FAQs. The IRS instructions for completing the different versions of Form 990 and its accompanying schedules are also excellent sources of information and are available on the IRS Web site at www.irs.gov.

You can view an image of the actual Forms 990, 990-EZ, or 990-PF filed by an organization. Click one of the links on the organization's GuideStar Report to open the PDF file in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Form 990 information is hand-keyed to make the data searchable on-line. To ensure accuracy, each form is keyed by two data entry workers.

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