Redactions · What we withhold

What this site withholds, and why

Everything on this site is built from public IRS filings; how is its own page. This one is narrower: what we deliberately leave out of what we publish, and why. It forms part of our privacy notice, which covers everything else — what we collect from people who use this site, and what we publish about people named in the filings. This page is about the filings themselves.

Grants to individuals

Most 990-PF filers give to organizations. Some give to people: a scholarship, a hardship-fund award, a disaster-relief payment. The filing reports the recipient’s name just as it would an organization’s. We do not publish that name.

A funder’s page shows individual grants as a single line, “N grants to individuals, $X total”, instead of the names and amounts a filing itemizes. The dollars still count in every total, median, and size distribution on the page; only the identification is withheld. The neighborhood-need comparison (where a funder’s giving is read against local hardship data) excludes those rows entirely, rather than placing a named person’s own ZIP code against a poverty rate.

The recipient is identified as an individual from the filer’s own return: the foundation-status code a 990-PF files for each grant, the same field that tells a reader “public charity” from “government” from “individual.” We read the filer’s own statement rather than guess from a name.

Why publish this at all, then

The underlying filing is already public. The IRS publishes it, and anyone can read the original return. The reason to hold a stricter line than “it was already public” is that a fast, indexed, name-searchable page is a different kind of exposure than a PDF on irs.gov that nobody has reason to search for. We can choose not to make that easier. Withholding the name costs nothing analytically: the count and the total are what the page’s figures actually need.

If you have a question

If a name you believe should be withheld under this policy appears on a page, or you have any other question about why an organization, a figure, or a person’s name appears on this site, write to data@useplinth.com. We read every message here directly; this is not a support queue. If you are named on a page and want it corrected, suppressed or removed, the rights this gives you and how we decide are set out at Part B5 of the privacy notice; if publication puts you at risk of harm, say so and mark the email urgent (B6) — we suppress first and assess afterwards.