How To Reinstate Tax-Exempt Status
Greg McRay, CEO The Foundation Group, has shared the process to regaining your Tax Exempt status after it has been revoked.
Greg explains:
The Internal Revenue Service has issued new guidance (in the form of Revenue Procedure 2014-11) for small nonprofits looking to regain lost tax-exemption. The process outlined in the Rev.Proc. significantly changes the reinstatement process…mostly for the better.
Under the old procedure, nonprofits that had their 501(c)(3) status revoked due to failure to file Form 990 for three consecutive years had a difficult time establishing sufficient reasonable cause, i.e., a good reason why they missed filing their Form 990 three years in a row. Reasonable cause was necessary to have their reinstatement be retroactive to when they lost their status. If they could somehow manage to establish reasonable cause, they also had to prepare and file Form 990-EZs for each of the years missed, even if one or two of those years only required Form 990-N originally. This proved to be a very time-consuming and expensive process.
Nonprofits could choose to forgo retroactivity, but had to settle for a new 501(c)(3) effective date that matched the postmark date of the reinstatement application. The big problem with that scenario was the creation of a taxable “gap” period between the date the nonprofit first lost its tax exemption and when it got it restored.
- For Example: If a nonprofit lost its 501(c)(3) status effective May 15, 2012 and could not establish reasonable cause for retroactive reinstatement, and filed a new 501(c)(3) application on July 15, 2013, they would have a taxable gap of 14 months
