Millions of Dollars in Grants Described in Just 16 Words

This is number 3 in a series of five illustrations of the good and the bad in program service descriptions appearing in Internal Revenue Service Forms 990.

American Friends of the Israel Museum

Between 2001 and 2018 American Friends of the Israel Museum granted the museum annual amounts ranging between a low of $8.1 million in 2003 and a high of $76.5 million in 2013. In each of those 19 years, program service accomplishment were described on the charity’s Form 990 in the same handful of words which we reproduce below. That response is a clear violation of the entry required by the Internal Revenue Service. (See Descriptions of Charity Programs: What the IRS Wants for more on IRS requirements for descriptions of charity programs.)

Program Activity CULTURAL EXCHANGE – SUPPORT FOR APPROVED PROJECTS AND THE ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY COLLECTIONS OF THE ISRAEL MUSEUM

Other pages in this section: Chai Lifeline follows IRS instructions in describing its program accomplishments, The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research describes its activities but does not provide quantitative measures of its performance, grants the Israeli Museum tens of millions annually, but describes its accomplishments in the same 16 words each year, MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger describes its large number of programs in a single unreadable paragraph of over a thousand words, Yad Ezra V’Shulamit describes programs of its Israeli beneficiary without ever mentioning its own programs.