Form 990 Schedule I: where a grant shows its work

“We awarded grants to community organisations” is a sentence. Schedule I of IRS Form 990 is a table. When you want to know what a grant program actually did in a year, the table is the thing to read, and it is public by design.

What triggers the schedule

Form 990 itself asks the question. If an organisation reported more than $5,000 of grants or other assistance to domestic organisations or domestic governments during the tax year, it must complete Part II of Schedule I. If it reported more than $5,000 of grants to domestic individuals, it must complete Part III. Answer yes to either question on the main form and the schedule is no longer optional.

What Part II has to say about each recipient

For every domestic organisation or government that received more than $5,000 in the year, Part II requires a row with:

• the recipient's name and address;
• its EIN — the federal employer identification number, which is what lets you look the recipient up independently;
• its IRC section, where applicable — the paragraph under which it is exempt;
• the amount of cash granted;
• the amount and description of non-cash assistance, and the method of valuation used for it;
• the purpose of the grant.

Everything under the $5,000 line can be reported as a single aggregate figure instead. That is the most useful thing to understand about the schedule: it is not a complete ledger, it is a named list above a threshold plus one lump below it. A program that makes many small awards will show a long aggregate and a short list, and that is compliance, not concealment.

Part III is the one people forget

Grants to individuals — scholarships, hardship payments, stipends to young people in a mentoring program — are reported by type of assistance, with the number of recipients and the amounts, not by name. The privacy of the individual is the reason. So a program that spends most of its money on people rather than on organisations will have a thin Part II and a substantial Part III, and reading only the first table will understate what it did by design.

Which return, and when

Not every exempt organisation files the full Form 990. The IRS sets the return by size: the shortest electronic notice for the smallest organisations, Form 990-EZ in the middle band, and the full Form 990 above it. Schedule I attaches to the full return — which is one reason a small program's grants may be visible only as a total. The IRS page on which form to file states the current thresholds; they have changed before and will again, which is exactly why we link the page rather than printing a number that could quietly go stale here.

How to read one in ten minutes

1. Start on the main form, Part IV. Find the grant questions. They tell you whether Schedule I should exist at all.
2. Open Schedule I, Part I. It describes the organisation's procedures for monitoring grants — the paragraph that says how the money is followed after it leaves.
3. Read Part II for names, Part III for programs. Then compare the sum of the two with the grants figure on the main form's statement of functional expenses. They should agree.
4. Look up one EIN. Pick a recipient and check that it exists and does what the purpose column says. One check is usually enough to tell you how carefully the form was prepared.

In Massachusetts a charity's federal return is only half of the public file: the state's own annual filing adds a layer, with its own thresholds and its own deadline, and we set that out in the piece on Form PC. The project's own program pages describe what it funds — the grant program, the mentoring night and how donations are handled — and the desk index is Boston & Community. Everything on the site is listed in the archive.

What we read

Every figure above comes from one of these documents. If a number is not in them, it is not in this piece.

• IRS: Instructions for Schedule I (Form 990), Grants and Other Assistance
• IRS: Schedule I (Form 990) — the form itself
• IRS: Form 990 series — which return an organisation files