Offices and agencies that regulate charities—including the IRS, state attorneys general, secretaries of state, and other state and local charity-regulation officials—oversee nonprofit registration, charitable solicitation, board governance, and more to ensure nonprofits are trustworthy and serve their charitable purposes. In a 2024 brief, we used responses from the Nonprofit Trends and Impacts Study’s annual National Survey of Nonprofit Trends and Impacts to understand nonprofits’ contact with these offices and agencies. In this brief, we update that 2024 brief with new information on whether, at what levels, and why nonprofits contacted regulatory agencies and offices in 2024.

Key Findings

• One-third of nonprofits (33 percent) reported contacting offices or agencies that regulate charities in 2024. Nonprofits of all sizes and subsectors reported doing so. But smaller nonprofits, education nonprofits, and nonprofits that did not report receiving federal government funding were less likely than other nonprofits to report contacting offices or agencies that regulate charities.
• A larger percentage of nonprofits reported contacting state offices or agencies that regulate charities (28 percent) than federal (16 percent) or state (15 percent) ones.
• The nonprofits that reported contacting regulating offices or agencies most often did so to respond to requests for information about their organization (13 percent), seek information about state-level registration and other regulatory filings (13 percent), seek information about existing regulatory requirements (12 percent), and submit forms for notice or approval of changes in their organization (12 percent).
• The largest organizations (20 percent) and health organizations (18 percent) were most likely to report contacting offices or agencies that regulate charities to respond to requests for information about their organization.
• Nonprofits were more likely to report seeking information about state charitable regulatory requirements (11 percent) than federal (5 percent) or local (4 percent) ones.

How We Did It

The data we analyze in this brief come from the Nonprofit Trends and Impacts Study, which provides nationally representative insights about nonprofit programs and services, staff and volunteers, fundraising, donations, finances, government engagement, and more.