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IRS Form 990-PF Private Foundation Scraper - Grant Detail

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IRS Form 990-PF Private Foundation Scraper — Grant Detail

Parses IRS bulk XML downloads for Form 990-PF (private foundation) filings and extracts Part XV grant detail — recipient name, address, purpose, and amount paid. Covers ~120k private foundations filing annually. Distinct from the propublica-nonprofit-crawler, which targets Form 990 public charities — 990-PF is a different schema aimed at grant-research buyers.

Features

  • Downloads IRS TEOS (Tax-Exempt Organization Submission) annual ZIP batches directly from the IRS open-data portal.
  • Filters for 990-PF returns only and parses XML for each filing.
  • Extracts foundation header data: EIN, legal name, address, filing year.
  • Extracts financial summaries: total assets at year-end, total revenue, qualifying distributions, investment income, excise tax.
  • Extracts all officers and trustees with title and compensation.
  • Extracts Part XV grant rows: recipient name, address (US or foreign), purpose, and dollar amount.
  • Three modes: browse all foundations in a year, look up specific EINs, or filter by recipient name.
  • Supports state filter, foundation name filter, and minimum grant amount threshold.
  • No API key, no proxy, no browser required. IRS open data is fully public.

Who Uses 990-PF Data?

  • Grant writers — Identify private foundations that have funded projects in your sector, then look up recipient names and grant purposes to write more targeted proposals.
  • Nonprofit fundraising teams — Prospect for new funders by searching for foundations that have granted to peer organizations.
  • Foundation-prospect-research consultants — Build bulk grant landscapes for clients: which funders are active in education/health/arts in a given state, and how much are they distributing.
  • Grant-research SaaS platforms — Power foundation search features with structured 990-PF data without writing an IRS parser.
  • Impact investors and program officers — Analyze grant flows across a field by pulling multi-year distributions and recipient patterns.
  • Journalists — Follow the money from a specific foundation across years and grantees.

How the IRS 990-PF Scraper Works

The IRS publishes all 990-series XML filings as bulk ZIP archives on their Form 990 Series Downloads page. Each annual ZIP batch contains thousands of XML files, one per return. The scraper:

  1. Fetches the IRS download page to discover the ZIP URLs for the requested year.
  2. Downloads each ZIP batch sequentially (batches are ~70–100 MB compressed).
  3. Unpacks each XML file and checks the ReturnTypeCd for 990PF.
  4. Parses the IRS XML schema to extract foundation header, financials, officers, and Part XV grant groups.
  5. Applies any filters (state, name, EIN, recipient, minimum grant amount) and saves matching records.

Modes

grants_by_year (default)

Returns all 990-PF filings in the specified year. Use stateFilter, foundationName, and minGrantAmount to narrow results.

{
  "mode": "grants_by_year",
  "filingYear": 2024,
  "stateFilter": "CA",
  "minGrantAmount": 100000,
  "maxItems": 50
}

foundation_lookup

Fetch filings for specific foundations by EIN. Scans annual batches until all requested EINs are found.

{
  "mode": "foundation_lookup",
  "einList": ["13-1803509", "23-7129889"],
  "filingYear": 2024,
  "maxItems": 10
}

grants_by_recipient

Returns foundations that made grants to recipients matching the supplied name substring. Useful for finding all funders that have supported a specific organization.

{
  "mode": "grants_by_recipient",
  "recipientName": "Red Cross",
  "filingYear": 2024,
  "maxItems": 20
}

Output Schema

Each record represents one foundation's 990-PF filing for a given tax year.

Field Type Description
foundation_ein string 9-digit EIN
foundation_name string Legal name
filing_year number Tax year
return_type string Always 990PF
foundation_address string Street address
foundation_city string City
foundation_state string 2-letter state code
foundation_zip string ZIP code
total_assets_eoy number Total assets at year-end (USD)
total_revenue number Total revenue (USD)
total_grants_paid number Qualifying distributions paid (USD)
investment_income number Net investment income (USD)
excise_tax_paid number Excise tax on investment income (USD)
trustee_count number Number of trustees/officers
trustees array name|title|compensation per trustee
grant_count number Number of Part XV grants
grants array recipient|city, state zip|purpose|amount per grant
source_xml_url string IRS ZIP batch URL
source_file string XML filename in the ZIP
scraped_at string ISO 8601 scrape timestamp

Notes

  • Memory: The actor uses 2048 MB by default to handle large ZIP decompression and XML parsing. Reduce to 512 MB for small runs.
  • Timeout: IRS ZIP batches are large. Allow at least 1 hour for a complete year scan.
  • Year coverage: IRS publishes TEOS data for the current and prior years. Data for the most recent tax year typically appears a few months after year-end.
  • maxItems: The default is 15 for quick validation. Increase for bulk extraction.
  • Proxy: Not required. The IRS open-data portal is fully public.
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