Lawsuit Seeks Electronic Access to Nonprofits’ IRS Filings

An open-records activist has gone to court to prod the Internal Revenue Service to make available nonprofit organizations’ financial information in an easily readable and searchable electronic format, The Washington Post writes.

Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org filed suit Tuesday in federal court in California, seeking to overturn the tax agency’s February denial of a Freedom of Information Act request for all Form 990s in a machine-readable format. The IRS said the data were adequately available to the public in the form of PDFs.

Individual groups’ 990s are accessible as PDFs through services such as GuideStar, but that format does not allow for collating data from multiple entities in particular areas, such as compensation and expenses. In a paper earlier this year, the Aspen Institute argued that a machine-readable version of 990s data would make it easier to spot fraud and abuse and measure economic impact in the $4.3-trillion nonprofit sector.