Toward Automating Shredding Nonprofit XML Files: The Case of IRS Form 990 Data

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents and describes data for nonprofit Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings in the United States of America. The data contains 831 attributes and 1,102,884 records for the years 2016 to 2021. Among other items, the data include nonprofits' comparative financial data, governance disclosures, hired contractors, management compensation, a detailed statement of revenue, statement of functional expenses, external audit, federal audit election, and reconciliation of net assets. The data are generated using Structured Query Language (SQL) self-developed code to convert the IRS Form 990 Extensible Markup Language (XML) tax filing files to a dataset in Excel. This paper is the first to convert these XML files and provide much-needed open access to nonprofit data in a long format.1 The source code that we developed and a step-by-step guide are included in this paper, allowing researchers to update this dataset.