TPF financial details

Allison on 2005-07-14T07:07:23

Why can't we see where our donation money goes? We see appeals for money, and donations going into a bottomless pit, and the occasional "$4,000 to X, $50,000 to Y" go past. But where's the annual report with the actual details of what was earned and what was spent and where, and how much you have in the bank at the end of each year.

You can find TPF's tax returns online (not 2004 yet, because it hasn't been received, stamped and sent back yet). Not the friendliest presentation, but it's all there. (Though, I notice the online version of the 2003 990 is missing an attached statement for grants that didn't fit on the main page. I'll look into that.)

Also, until recently anyone could see the same information in lots of pretty charts and graphs on GuideStar.org. The information is still there, but they changed their policy so you have to register for a free account to see anything, and you have to pay for an account to see anything very useful.

So, we're looking for another way to do the friendly display. It looks like it's going to boil down to getting someone to write the code. None of our current volunteers have the time, but I expect it will be a pretty straightforward job, especially for someone who already writes Perl code for a financial company. Maybe a couple of weekends, and some light maintenance down the road. Any takers? The data is up in the tax returns now, so feel free to play with it and show us a sample site. :)

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Information removed?

tmtm on 2005-07-15T12:04:20

Thanks for making this all available.

It looks like some of the information has been removed from these documents, although I'm not entirely sure as I don't really know the US forms. Has information been whited out? If so, is there a general policy for this, as I presume the full information would be available from some government office somewhere?

Thanks,

Tony

Re:Information removed?

Allison on 2005-07-17T05:50:55

Has information been whited out?

Some has been marked out with black squares, but as far as I can tell it's just signatures. The financial data hasn't been.

Re:Information removed?

tmtm on 2005-07-17T08:32:02

If you look at p10 of the 2000 report, or p14 of the 2001 report, for example, it appears that the details of large contributors have been removed...

Tony

Re:Information removed?

Allison on 2005-07-21T00:19:30

Ah, yes. That's a privacy thing.

Re:Information removed?

tmtm on 2005-07-21T08:39:22

I can almost, but not quite, understand that. I assume that the information is publically available anyway from some other source? So there's no real expectation of privacy here?

I'm also assuming that the privacy here is in relation to people's addresses rather than names? Would a useful compromise be to remove the addresses and leave the names?

Tony