How The IRS Keeps the $4.3 Trillion Nonprofit World Secret
20th June 2013
Carl Malamud is suing the IRS over a problem you probably haven’t heard about: the agency’s unwillingness to let the rest of us easily scrutinize nonprofits.
Malamud, a California-based transparency activist, knows a few things about liberating public records. He’s the reason the Securities and Exchange Commission started putting the submissions of public companies online back in the 1990s, why you can see so many hearings on C-SPAN, and why lists of legally enforceable codes and standards may finally become available for free. He’s been badgering the IRS to put nonprofit data online for over a year now, and in the meantime, has uploaded the last decade’s worth of 990s to his Web site Public.Resource.org. It costs him a few thousand dollars a year — a considerable sum for his small organization, but nothing for a massive government agency.