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Why Do You Ask? After having covered Asian America for 20 years, we thought we knew quite a bit about the advocacy and community groups who have been and are now shaping our lives and our futures. We have covered fundraisers, officer inductions, award ceremonies; we’re on each other’s e-mail lists, fax lists, Rolodexes. But we have known far less about nonprofits’ finances than about those of other institutions we cover -- government, academia and big business. Though a matter of public record, copies of the documents did not have to be provided -- meaning that a near-photographic memory would be necessary to absorb all the information. The IRS this month helped us and others by making those public records much more so. Now, groups must provide within 30 days the past three years of completed 990 forms, which list gross revenue, budget figures and sometimes top salaries. These figures are no more intrusive than Securities and Exchange Commission forms that corporations must submit or the budget proposals now before councils and boards of supervisors across California and the nation. Yet our requests for 990 forms have met with discomfort and delay in many cases. Groups ask us: Why do you want these records? Why do you want to know? Well, what is in those records is increasingly important to our readers in making decisions on which of thousands of groups to support. Making well-informed decisions entails knowing more about a group than its name or its sound bites, which almost always convey a laudable goal: civil rights, equality, better education, better environment. Part of our job is to provide the information that will help readers understand both where their charitable and their tax dollars are going. Most taxpayers and potential donors do not have the dozens of man-hours of research to devote to getting the information themselves, which is one of the reasons they turn to newspapers like us. All 501c3 nonprofits, whether they take government money or not, are in fact public trusts, exempted from paying taxes on property or income and endowed with the privilege to bestow upon donors a tax break. APA nonprofits, in particular, are our public advocates -- those whose positions are reported around the world as representing the Asian American community. Just as individuals answer to a boss and as politicians answer to the public, so, too, must nonprofits answer to their contingencies, which in this case is Asian Americans. That’s why we ask.
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