These instructions will help you better analyze the IRS 990 public dataset. The first thing you'll want to do is to read through the documentation over at Amazon. There's a ~108MB index file called index.json.gz that contains metadata describing the entire corpus.
To download the index.json.gz metadata file, you'll want to issue the following command: curl https://s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990/index.json.gz. Once you've downloaded the index.json.gz file, you can extract its contents with the following command: gunzip index.json.gz. To take a peek at the extracted contents, use the following command: head index.json.
Looking at the index.json file, you'll notice that it contains a json structure represented as a string. It contains an array of json objects that look like the following:
{"EIN": "721221647", "SubmittedOn": "2016-02-05", "TaxPeriod": "201412", "DLN": "93493309001115", "LastUpdated": "2016-03-21T17:23:53", "URL": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990/201513099349300111_public.xml", "FormType": "990", "ObjectId": "201513099349300111", "OrganizationName": "FERBER FAMILY OF HOUMA FNDTN CO JEWISH ENDOWMENT FOUNDATION", "IsElectronic": true, "IsAvailable": true}Each of these records represents if an electronic 990 filing is available for an organization. If an organization's electronic 990 filing is not available, you'll notice that "IsAvailable" will be set to false and it will be missing a "URL" entry.
Once you've figured out what entries you'd like to look at, please follow the below instructions to install tools that can help you further analyze the data.
As a note, you don't need to download the entire corpus to perform your analysis nor do you need an Amazon account.
Pull the business name, person name, title, hours_per_week, and total comp from the Form990PartVIISectionAGrp for a single curl call
curl -s https://s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990/201541349349307794_public.xml | xml2json | jq -c '
.Return.ReturnHeader.Filer.BusinessName.BusinessNameLine1Txt."$t" as
$companyName | .Return.ReturnData.IRS990.Form990PartVIISectionAGrp | .[] |
{company: $companyName, name:.PersonNm."$t", title: .TitleTxt."$t", hours_per_week: .AverageHoursPerWeekRt."$t",
total_comp: ((.ReportableCompFromOrgAmt."$t"|tonumber) + (.ReportableCompFromRltdOrgAmt."$t"|tonumber) +
(.OtherCompensationAmt."$t"|tonumber))}'Create csv friendly output including the business name, person name, title, hours_per_week, and total comp from the Form990PartVIISectionAGrp
for f in *.xml; do xml2json < $f | jq -r '
.Return.ReturnHeader.Filer.BusinessName.BusinessNameLine1Txt."$t" as
$companyName | .Return.ReturnData.IRS990.Form990PartVIISectionAGrp | map([$companyName, .PersonNm."$t", .TitleTxt."$t",
(.AverageHoursPerWeekRt."$t"|tonumber), ((.ReportableCompFromOrgAmt."$t"|tonumber) +
(.ReportableCompFromRltdOrgAmt."$t"|tonumber) + (.OtherCompensationAmt."$t"|tonumber))]) | .[] | @csv'; doneCreate a csv file called "990.csv" that includes the business name, person name, title, hours_per_week, and total comp from the Form990PartVIISectionAGrp
for f in *.xml; do xml2json < $f | jq -r '
.Return.ReturnHeader.Filer.BusinessName.BusinessNameLine1Txt."$t" as
$companyName | .Return.ReturnData.IRS990.Form990PartVIISectionAGrp | map([$companyName, .PersonNm."$t", .TitleTxt."$t",
(.AverageHoursPerWeekRt."$t"|tonumber), ((.ReportableCompFromOrgAmt."$t"|tonumber) +
(.ReportableCompFromRltdOrgAmt."$t"|tonumber) + (.OtherCompensationAmt."$t"|tonumber))]) | .[] | @csv'; done > 990.csvPull the business name, person name, title, hours_per_week, and total comp from the Form990PartVIISectionA for a single curl call
curl -s https://s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990/201302899349300950_public.xml | xml2json | jq -c '
.Return.ReturnHeader.Filer.Name.BusinessNameLine1."$t" as
$companyName | .Return.ReturnData.IRS990.Form990PartVIISectionA | .[] |
{company: $companyName, name:.NamePerson."$t", title: .Title."$t", hours_per_week: .AverageHoursPerWeek."$t"|tonumber,
total_comp: ((.ReportableCompFromOrganization."$t"|tonumber) + (.ReportableCompFromRelatedOrgs."$t"|tonumber) +
(.OtherCompensation."$t"|tonumber))}'Pull the business name, person name, title, hours_per_week, and total comp from the OfficerDirectorTrusteeEmplGrp for a single curl call
curl -s https://s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990/201502469349200225_public.xml | xml2json | jq -c '
.Return.ReturnHeader.Filer.BusinessName.BusinessNameLine1Txt."$t" as
$companyName | .Return.ReturnData.IRS990EZ.OfficerDirectorTrusteeEmplGrp | .[] |
{company: $companyName, name:.PersonNm."$t", title: .TitleTxt."$t", hours_per_week: .AverageHrsPerWkDevotedToPosRt."$t"|tonumber,
compensation_amount: (.CompensationAmt."$t"|tonumber)}'Create csv friendly output including the business name, person name, title, hours_per_week, and total comp from the OfficerDirectorTrusteeEmplGrp
for f in *.xml; do xml2json < $f | jq -r '
.Return.ReturnHeader.Filer.BusinessName.BusinessNameLine1Txt."$t" as
$companyName | .Return.ReturnData.IRS990EZ.OfficerDirectorTrusteeEmplGrp | map([$companyName, .PersonNm."$t", .TitleTxt."$t", (.AverageHrsPerWkDevotedToPosRt."$t"|tonumber), (.CompensationAmt."$t"|tonumber)]) | .[] | @csv'; doneCreate a csv file called "990EZ.csv" that includes the business name, person name, title, hours_per_week, and total comp from the OfficerDirectorTrusteeEmplGrp
for f in *.xml; do xml2json < $f | jq -r '
.Return.ReturnHeader.Filer.BusinessName.BusinessNameLine1Txt."$t" as
$companyName | .Return.ReturnData.IRS990EZ.OfficerDirectorTrusteeEmplGrp | map([$companyName, .PersonNm."$t", .TitleTxt."$t", (.AverageHrsPerWkDevotedToPosRt."$t"|tonumber), (.CompensationAmt."$t"|tonumber)]) | .[] | @csv'; done > 990EZ.csv
FYI, the index.json file is no longer available. Instead, yearly index.json files are available at