Blog URL: http://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/dec/11/yir-karen-lca/

Video URL: http://sfconservancy.org/videos/2015-01-15_Karen-Sandler_Low-Down-Irs-Status-USA_LCA-2015.mp4

December 11, 2015 by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler

2015 YIR: Karen Sandler Speaks about IRS Charity Issues

[ This is a blog post is the first in our series, Conservancy 2015: Year in Review. ]

Conservancy's 2015 started with the filing of our FY 2013 Form 990. That's the IRS tax form that every charity and trade association in the USA must file annually. Typically, most non-profits ask for the two three-month extensions for filing deadline for the Form 990, and since Conservancy's fiscal year ends in February, our Form 990 is filed by 15 January.

This is the type of essential work that Conservancy does for our member projects. Each member project need not file their own complicated forms to maintain their charitable status and ability to accept earmarked donations for their projects. Instead, Conservancy files one Form 990. We're “looking forward” to spending this holiday season preparing our next FY 2014 Form 990 and completing our mandated annual audit. (Our FY 2013 annual audit is of course already available.

Fitting with this annual work that Conservancy does, immediately after filing the 990, both Karen and Bradley — thanks to generous travel funding by the conference — quickly boarded flights to LinuxConf Australia in Auckland, New Zealand. At the conference, on the very date of Conservancy's IRS filing deadline, Karen gave talk entitled The Low Down on IRS status for Free and Open Source Software Nonprofits in the US.

Even almost a year later, many of the issues Karen discussed in her talk are not well known in the Free Software community and there are still many confusions in the Open Source and Free Software about non-profit status and how it works. Enjoy this video now to see more about what Conservancy does for its member projects, and generally to learn more about how both charities and trade associations operate and what they do in our community.

The video in this post is also available on Youtube.

Posted by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler