Many associations also resisted providing public documents requested by CEO Update

The IRS almost canceled this annual CEO salary report.

COVID quickly disrupted business operations for the IRS in 2020 and 2021. However, slowdowns within the IRS divisions processing and distributing disclosures from tax-exempt organizations are getting worse, not better.

To date, the IRS has released 9% of the electronic data for organizations in this report with tax years ending Dec. 31, 2020, the bulk of disclosures needed by CEO Update.

Typically, 85% of that data is available by mid-May. These tax filings from associations were sent to the IRS by mid-November.

Timing of this popular report in CEO Update has always been determined by four factors: IRS filing deadlines for disclosures, the typical amount of time the IRS has needed to process large portions of this data, the time CEO Update spends collecting missing documents from individual associations and time to analyze and interpret final data.

Committed to providing this valuable report to the community on time, and unsure if the IRS would catch up before publication—spoiler, they didn't—CEO Update embarked on an ambitious project to collect the IRS Form 990 from more than 400 individual organizations.

CEO Update reporters, staff, managers and directors spent hundreds of hours collecting and processing IRS disclosures from individual associations. The IRS requires all tax-exempt organizations to provide the most recent public disclosure version of the IRS Form 990 to anyone who asks.

But not all organizations quickly complied with IRS disclosure rules. Until last week, about 10 percent of the organizations in this report had not provided the public disclosure version of their latest 990 even though they had been given ample time to do so.

Many required more persistence and convincing. Some required lessons in IRS rules and penalties for noncompliance. And still, five organizations did not respond to multiple calls and emails or flatly refused to provide those documents in violation of IRS rules.

CEO Update has identified those groups with footnotes in our accompanying charts and included salary details from our 2021 report. When the IRS catches up, CEO Update will publish the latest figures.

Reporters have found no conclusive reason for the delays from the IRS.

Even before the pandemic took its toll in 2020, the IRS spoke about technology upgrades that "temporarily" slowed distribution of data. It's unknown how much technology contributed, but the pandemic, which limited staff time in facilities that process tax documents from nonprofits, only exacerbated the delays.

The IRS' media relations team acknowledged the delays but did not provide further comment.

'Loss of faith'

Of course, CEO Update is not the only organization affected. Public interest groups also are hampered in their ability to bring transparency to associations and charities.

"The public is not getting the most up-to-date information about salaries, expenditures and revenue," said Cinthia Schuman Ottinger, deputy director for philanthropy programs at the Aspen Institute. "All this information is important for the public to know. This does lead to a loss of faith. It's very important that the IRS release these 990s and establish a regular schedule for releasing this information to the public."

Schuman Ottinger leads the Nonprofit Open Data Collective, a coalition of organizations-—including GuideStar, ProPublica and Charity Navigator—advocating for changes to how the IRS releases 990 data.