Form PC: the filing that makes a charity public

A charity registered in Massachusetts is not visible because it says it is. It is visible because the governing board of every public charity owes the Attorney General an annual filing under M.G.L. c.12 §8F — the Form PC — and the Non-Profit Organizations / Public Charities Division publishes what comes in.

The calendar

The Form PC covers the preceding fiscal year and is due four and a half months after that fiscal year ends. For an organisation on the calendar year, that is mid-May. The filing is not one document: it is the form, the appropriate IRS return, the correct fee, and — above the revenue lines described below — an accountant's review or audit.

The fee is a scale, not a number

The annual filing fee runs on a sliding scale tied to gross support and revenue, from $35 at the bottom to $2,000 at the top. Initial registration is separate: $100, plus either a schedule fee for an organisation registering before its first fiscal year has closed, or a fee based on the gross support and revenue of the year already completed. A small neighbourhood program and a large institution file the same form and pay very different amounts for it.

The thresholds that moved

This is the part most likely to be wrong in anything written before 2025. Massachusetts raised the financial-statement thresholds in the economic development act signed in late November 2024:

Accountant's report required with Form PC, by gross support and revenue

Requirement	Old threshold	After the 2024 act
Reviewed financial statements	over $200,000	over $500,000
Audited financial statements	over $500,000	over $1,000,000

Separately, the threshold at which an organisation must submit its IRS Form 990 to the Division rose from $5,000 to $25,000 of gross support and revenue. The practical effect for a mid-sized Boston program is real money: an organisation between half a million and a million dollars that used to owe a full audit now owes a review.

Why a reader should care about any of this

Because it tells you what to expect to find, and the absence of an expected document is information. If a charity reports two million dollars of revenue and there is no audit attached to its Form PC, that is a question. If it reports three hundred thousand and there is no audit, that is simply the rule working — and a reader who does not know the threshold will misread the second case as the first.

It also tells you the state file and the federal file are not duplicates. The federal return names grant recipients above $5,000; the state filing carries the fee scale, the board's signatures and the accountant's report. Reading one without the other leaves half of the record on the table.

How to pull a charity's Massachusetts file

1. Start with the Division's own instructions. They state the current fee scale, deadline and thresholds; the version linked below is the one to check against, because these figures are amended by statute, not by practice.
2. Match the fiscal year. Form PC covers the preceding year. A filing made in 2026 is a report about 2025, and comparing it with a 2026 press release is comparing two different years.
3. Check for the accountant's report at the right level. Review or audit, by the table above.
4. Then open the federal return. The two together are the whole public picture — and Schedule I is where the grants are named, as we describe in the Schedule I piece.

The project's own description of its work is on the about page, with the programs themselves on the grant program page and the donations page. Volunteer screening for the programs has its own statute, which we cover in the piece on CORI checks. Desk index: Boston & Community; full index: 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.

• Massachusetts Attorney General: Form PC instructions
• M.G.L. c.12 §8F — the duty of a public charity's governing board to file
• BNN: new Massachusetts law lowers nonprofit audit and review thresholds