This is great. AC is an old friend of mine, you guys are doing amazing work at ProPublica. Nice to see the tech work that runs behind the stories.

How do you get the data? I wasn't able to find the forms for 2018 for some charities. Did the IRS make them available yet?

The IRS puts them on an s3 bucket: https://docs.opendata.aws/irs-990/readme.html

There are 2018 filings in there, but many charities have fiscal years that end in Dec. IIRC, they generally file within 6 months. Given things like human error, bureaucracy and filing extensions... more should start rolling in over time.

Just thought this was curious, if I search for "HOCKANUM VALLEY COMMUNITY COUNCIL" nothing comes up for them specifically but if I search for the town they are in then the business appears in that list.

That's super weird! Comes up when I search other text in their form too. I'm gonna flag this and take a look tomorrow. Thanks!

Cool. I had one question, what's the usual lead time for non-profit data to show up in this dataset (e.g. when would you expect that 2018 forms/data would appear)?

There are already some 2018 forms in there, but it's based on fiscal year. So a nonprofit whose FY is Dec 2018 would have had to just file last month -- and sometimes they file late or get extensions. And again, this only covers e-filed forms -- they could file on paper, in which case you'd have to use the nonprofit name search and check for a filing.

Is it possible to sort after searching? Or filter by annual revenue? I'd like to see the organizations with the highest annual revenue for my specific searches. Thanks!

Those are good suggestions! I'm planing to add sorting by year, but revenue makes sense as well.

assuming elastic search?

Yup! We use it for a bunch of things, and I thought: what if I just dumped all this into it?