Best way to have tax return access?

[JFWooten4]

We should add a clear public filings or financial disclosures page to the site so visitors can easily access our required nonprofit filings, including annual returns once available.

Right now, someone may be able to verify from the IRS site that a return was filed, but that does not make it especially easy to find, download, or review. It also is not ideal to make members, donors, regulators, or the public search through IRS systems just to confirm basic public financial information.

Background

Tax-exempt organizations are generally expected to make certain annual returns and exemption materials available for public inspection and copying. Online hosting is not necessarily the only way to satisfy that requirement, but it is the cleanest and most transparent approach.

For our purposes, we should have a simple, visible place where public filings and financial materials can be found without requiring anyone to search externally.

Commentary

We could do this through Issuers.info, but I think that would be a little overkill for our needs. I also thought about doing this through the DAO site, like with #26 (comment). My hesitation with that is taxes are more of a centralized "done by the 'team'" sort of definitive statement, which isn't exactly the point I envisioned with the community site.

[tehchives]

Thanks John for putting this together. Although the IRS filings are publicly reviewable, I do agree it is more cumbersome for users and being proactive about setting up a portal for ease of visibility is worth doing. This is all the more important to have settled while we're still filing the 990n instead of the 990. I like your thoughts on including other relevant financial info as well, like donations in aggregate and the health of our coffers.

Perhaps it would be best to have a different cname redirected page through github for this? finances.whydrs.org etc? Simple enough to do and it can be linked to from the central directory too.

On a side note, I don't see how we can get away from the centralized nature of tax filings. That may be a different conversation for much further down the line. The 990n is a simple form which I do not mind to take care of for now, but hopefully we are required to figure out the 990 sooner than later!

[JFWooten4]

I'm putting together a proposal that should start helping tackle the initial and latter parts on viable donations (health of coffers) and the centralized nature of tax filings. It really does suck, but that's how it is, and I've come up with some strategies and ideas in compiling Working Items (view) (specifically the Financials).

I remember when I started making websites a long time ago, and I had the same idea as you with different subdomains for all the different things. But over time, it gets annoying using separate deployments for each host, since all the sites need their own CNAMEs, like you said, but then also association with a host. It just gets messy quickly.

What if we did something a little simpler with some static hosting in @JamesAlfonse's Google Cloud config? It is my limited understanding that we were leaning that way anyway for the Taking Stock and DUNA meeting hosting? (Mostly the latter.)

[tehchives]

Great idea John. We're talking about files that are never going to be edited and pages only get new items added annually. Static hosting and permalinks make a lot more sense.