U.S. Nonprofits Handle $3 Trillion Annually, More Than UK's GDP

Summary

The article reveals that U.S. nonprofits handle $3 trillion annually, more than the UK's GDP, with money flowing through hospitals, universities, religious organizations, and charitable nonprofits. The authors built a system to process 4 million IRS 990 filings and discovered that while all this financial data is publicly available as digitized XML documents from 2012 onward, the schemas and field names change between years, making analysis challenging. The piece highlights the surprising scale of nonprofit finances and the technical challenges in analyzing this massive public dataset.