Legal Status + Registration

EINs

IRS / FEDERAL EIN AKA TAX ID #

83-1410912

OHIO Entity # AKA Secretary of State charter number

4207782

Re: EINs and sharing them and security, our attorney said this:

"Your EIN isn’t something to be overly worried about sharing. After all, it will be or is on every form 990 that you file with the IRS and is made public there. And it is public in the IRS tax exempt organization search. In fact, when I need an EIN for a nonprofit, I typically just search it on Google and find it from the organizational tax returns that are harvested and posted by nonprofit accountability and rating sites.

Donors will end up wanting it for their records if they are going to claim a deduction, just in case of audit.

In short, although an EIN is similar to a personal SSN in that it is the unique identifier the IRS uses, it is different in that it isn’t otherwise used as a security code or identity verification code. So it doesn’t have the same kinds of risks.

Someone could try to use the EIN to commit fraud, but they could already get it from public sources if they wanted it."

Fiscal Sponsorship

From our founding to October 2021, Matter was fiscally sponsored by the Institute for Nonprofit News, meaning we collected donations through them. There were many upsides to this arrangement: they handled much of our bookkeeping and tax filings. Now that we have our own 501c3 status and are getting further along in our evolution and team building, we have capacity to take this over ourselves and operate Matter independently under nonprofit Grey Matter Media.

Benefits to this transition:

SAVE $ - we can do a lot of our own accounting/bookkeeping for free, so we will save on those and won't owe the fiscal sponsorship fee either
GAIN FISCAL CONTROL- we will now own all of our own accounts, which will make our lives so much better in terms of accounting and bookkeeping and reporting, etc. This will also allow us to secure insurance and track our budget more accurately.

Challenges of this transition:

FILING TAXES - need to begin filing own, including 990N this year
FISCAL INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDED - team being formed to handle
ONGOING BOOKKEEPING NEEDED - just need to ID volunteer
LOSING DONORS - our monthly donors could not physically be migrated, so we are going to have to get them to manually reup

Federal Status

501c3 - APPROVED dating back to 8/12/20.

- - - I think I still need to fully understand the ramifications of that, but I think it’s fine.
    - 990n needs filed 11/15/21 and 990 beginning 11/15/22
- Fiscal Sponsor
  - 7/1/21 will switch to operating independent. Need to get finances board on this asap - make it their main first agenda item.
    - Need to decide on new payment processor
    - NEWS REVENUE HUB** Need to check with them

Ohio Status

We are registered as a nonprofit LLC w/ Ohio Secretary of State and have been since 8/12/20 - we originally incorporated as a for profit llc 7/20/18 and filed an amendment in August which flipped us to nonprofit.
- - Nonprofit LLC vs. Nonprofit Corporation
    - Growing trend to do nonprofit LLC
    - Nonprofit corporation could be simplest way to get a low-hassle nonprofit conversion process
- -in 2021 we switched Cassie to the statutory agent. we may need to switch this at some point if Cassie moves addresses or if someone else makes sense. this is supposed to be a high level employee who is trusted to receive legal business mail for us.
We registered for charitable solicitation in Ohio 10/15/21 through the Ohio Attorney General.

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