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On Friday, we updated our Nonprofit Explorer database in two big ways. First, we’ve added the ability to view key employees and officers right on an organization’s page. Second, we’ve updated and extracted a ton of fresh data beyond our normal tax filing updates, adding millions of new employee records and tens of thousands of new audits.
Now, on an organization’s page on Nonprofit Explorer, you’ll notice a new section below each entity’s financial information for each fiscal year. In that section, you’ll find up to 25 key employees and officers of the organization, along with each person’s role and compensation.
This new feature provides detail beyond the executive compensation numbers reported in the financial summaries. When looking at universities and their athletic associations, for example, you’ll be able to quickly see that football coaches pull in some of the largest paychecks: Kirby Smart at the University of Georgia made $6.7 million in fiscal year 2019, while Dan Mullen at the University of Florida received $6 million in compensation in the same period. And you’ll find $18 million in compensation to Bobby Petrino, former head football coach at the University of Louisville, in the 2019 fiscal year. The organization’s filing explains that $13.1 million of that total was payment for early termination of Petrino’s contract. (Petrino is now head coach at Missouri State.)
While we’ve had a people search feature since 2018, allowing users to find anyone listed on electronically filed tax returns as an employee or board member, this is the first time we’ve surfaced that information in an easy-to-use way.
Now, that information is available right on an organization’s main page. For full financial details — including benefits and compensation from related organizations — you’ll still need to read the organization’s full 990 filing. But this feature offers a more convenient way to view information on the more than 24 million key employees and board members in our database.
While the majority of tax-exempt organizations that file tax forms do so electronically, some still file on paper. (Small nonprofits do not need to file a 990.) You won’t see employee and officer data for organizations that submit paper filings, as we’re only able to extract this information from electronic filings. However, since a 2019 law mandates e-filing for all organizations in fiscal years ending after June 30, 2020, we’ll be able to provide employee data for an increasingly large proportion of organizations once newer filings come in.
While we update 990 filings monthly, we also provide other data about nonprofits. The employee records we’re surfacing are now updated for all filings processed through early May 2021, which adds nearly 8 million new records. We’ve also added more than 33,000 audits of nonprofit organizations from the Federal Audit Clearinghouse. These documents provide additional insight into the financial management and oversight at nonprofit organizations that spend $750,000 or more in federal grant money in a given fiscal year.
The recent updates expand the information already available on Nonprofit Explorer, which puts nearly a decade of financial information about tax-exempt organizations across the U.S. at your fingertips — whether you’re a journalist backgrounding a source, a potential donor researching charitable organizations or a researcher compiling data.
We make this public information available and easy to access so that anyone can use it — and we want to hear what you’re using it for. Have you used the compensation data, or other nonprofit data, to report a story? Drop us a line and tell us about it!