Hey all, Trying to make a donation to the EC, but I haven't been able to find a 990 form anywhere. Do you guys have access to the form?
Hi, Smurf. We file the 990EZ, which is the form for small nonprofits with under 50K in annual budget/donations. It's filed electronically, and basically just attests to the fact that our budget is under 50K; it doesn't have the normal budget and expenditures like a full 990 has. That's why you can't find the 990. (We also have not yet filed it for 2017.) I'm happy to answer any questions you may have about specific expenses, but here are some broad strokes: -- We have no paid staff and have never paid out anything to staff members, board members, or any others with any interest or formal connection to the organization. -- Many of our services (servers, software, etc.) are in-kind donations (for example, our ISP, NationalNet, donates the three servers and bandwidth that run the EC site). In-kind donations last year amounted to about $15,000 -- About 90% of our cash expenditures last year (I don't have the number offhand, but less than 6,000) went to cover costs for the platform upgrade. Of this, probably about half was off-the-shelf software and plug-ins, and about half was paid to our contracted software engineer who did most of the custom plug-ins. The other ~10% paid for expenses such as filing fees to renew our trademark, domain registration, filing fees for the State, and so forth. Our software engineer is the only person associated with EC that has been paid in any way. Please let me know if you have any other questions, or would like any more detailed information.
I'm of the impression that Guidestar picks up its information from publicly available filings rather than from the nonprofits themselves (perhaps by requesting them from the IRS?) , but we can definitely look into it. The filing we do is electronic, and if I remember right, it doesn't even give us the option to save a copy of it... but I'll check more into it and see what we can come up with. As I said, the 990EZ is about 2 lines long. It's something like 1. Did the nonprofit have less than $50,000 in income in the last year? 2. Do you attest that the above statement is true So there isn't much there. But I'll ask and see if we can get something to Guidestar. I'm sure that would be useful to many people.
I appreciate that Chip. From my understanding Guidestar only collects 990 automatically, but you are able to upload financial documents to the profile of the nonprofit. It just gives more credibility so people know how to support you guys. I don't believe California has a separate 990 EZ form, but this is the one from the IRS https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f990ez.pdf Thank you for everything you guys do
