501(c)(3) determination support for US businesses

A named person on our team owns your file and reviews everything that leaves it. Software does a real share of the grinding underneath it — coding, matching, flagging the obvious gaps — but nothing regulated happens without a person’s judgement, and nothing here is signed or filed by an algorithm.

The determination filing is prepared with US counsel or the partner CPA firm; state charitable-solicitation registrations follow per state.

Whatever you already run. Most commonly QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho Books and a handful of others — we work inside your system rather than moving you onto one of our own.

A short, free read-only look at what you already have, and a written note on what we found. A scoping call decides the size of the engagement — nothing here commits you to anything.

There is no published price for 501(c)(3) determination support — it depends on volume, how many entities are involved, and how far behind the books are. We quote after the read-only review, which is free.

501(c)(3) determination support sits inside registrations & licences, alongside EIN registration, State payroll registrations, Seller’s permit registration. Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

It's the IRS's recognition that the organization is exempt from federal income tax under Section 501(c)(3) and, as a direct consequence, that donations to it are tax-deductible for donors. It combines what India splits into two filings — 12A for the entity's own exemption and 80G for donor deductibility — into a single letter.

Form 1023-EZ is the short, checkbox application available only to organizations projecting $50,000 or less in gross receipts for each of the next three years (and the past three, if already operating) with total assets of $250,000 or less, plus other eligibility-worksheet exclusions. Above those thresholds, or outside the worksheet's eligibility, the filing has to be the full Form 1023 — a narrative application with a detailed activities statement and budget.

The IRS user fee is $275 for Form 1023-EZ and $600 for the full Form 1023, both paid through Pay.gov before the application is reviewed. These are the official IRS fees.

The IRS's own reporting shows Form 1023-EZ applications averaging around 14 days to a determination, against roughly 97 days on average for the full Form 1023. These are published averages, not a guaranteed turnaround — either form can take longer if the IRS has follow-up questions.

Yes. Federal tax-exempt status is a separate step from state incorporation — the organization has to exist as a state nonprofit corporation, with Articles of Incorporation carrying the exempt-purpose and dissolution language the IRS looks for, before a 1023 or 1023-EZ application is filed.

We check bylaws and Articles against what the IRS application asks for — exempt-purpose language, a dissolution clause, a conflict-of-interest policy — and flag gaps. Drafting or amending governing-document language is reviewed by our partner attorney; it's governance-document work that sits with a licensed professional, not something we draft unsupervised.

The determination filing is prepared with US counsel or the partner CPA firm, on the attorney-reviewed foundation we build. That is the boundary for this service: we prepare the file to the point it can be filed correctly; the filing itself runs through your counsel or the partner CPA firm.

Most states require charitable solicitation registration before an organization solicits donations from residents of that state, and a national donate page can trigger the requirement broadly — not just where the organization is physically based. We map which states your actual planned solicitation activity reaches and build the registration and renewal matrix from that footprint.

No. The IRS determination is a federal tax-exemption status. State charitable-solicitation registration is a separate, state-by-state requirement that has no equivalent in India's 12A/80G regime at all, and it follows the determination as its own filing track — each state's registration follows per that state's process.

The IRS can revoke or contest a determination granted on an application that didn't meet the eligibility worksheet's thresholds. That's why we run the worksheet against your actual projected and historical financial figures before recommending which form to prepare, rather than assuming size alone qualifies an organization.

It's a governance document the board adopts that lays out how the organization handles situations where a board member or officer has a personal or financial interest in a decision. The IRS treats its presence, or absence, as a governance signal on the 1023 application, so we check for it as part of the governance-document review and flag any gap to the partner attorney.