← Blog

"See Attached Schedule": The Grant List a Foundation Filed and Nobody Can Read

September 8, 2026·By Brodie Wells

There is a Richmond foundation that gives away about $900,000 a year to children's charities. I can tell you the total. I can tell you the year. I can name you four of its grantees, and they add up to $550.

Its most recent Form 990-PF lists its grants like this:

SEE ATTACHED SCHEDULE, C/O P O BOX 18488 ..... $966,600

ST STEPHEN'S CHURCH ..... $250

FEED MORE ..... $100

COMMUNITIES IN SCHOOLS ..... $100

STEWARD SCHOOL ..... $100

Four real organizations, itemized down to the last hundred dollars. And then 99.9% of the money, behind four words.

We ran into this while building GrantSnag, and I want to explain it properly, because if you have ever pulled a 990-PF and found a blank where the grantee list should be, you were not doing it wrong.

What the filing is supposed to say

Part XV of the 990-PF is where a private foundation lists the grants it paid: who got the money, how much, and what for. It is the single most useful page in nonprofit finance. It is how you find out that the family foundation two towns over has written a check to an organization exactly like yours for six years running.

When a foundation files on paper, that list is an attachment, and the IRS scans the attachment along with the form. You get the names.

When a foundation e-files, the list is supposed to arrive as structured data inside the XML. Often it does not. The preparer puts the words "SEE ATTACHED SCHEDULE" in the recipient name field, drops in the total, and moves on.

The part that surprised me

My first assumption was that the PDF on the IRS site would be no help, because for an e-filed return that PDF is generated from the same XML. It is a rendering, not a photograph.

That turns out to be half right, and the other half is the interesting half.

The IRS-hosted PDF is the rendering of the XML plus whatever the filer appended to their submission. So when the preparer attaches the schedule as a document rather than typing it into the data fields, it does not reach the XML, it does not reach any database built on the XML, and it does reach the PDF. It is published. It is just published as a picture.

We pulled a random sample of these filings to find out how often. Of 14, twelve had a PDF posted for that tax year, and five of the twelve contained the full grantee list. Small sample, so treat it as "about two in five" rather than a precise rate, but the pattern is unambiguous, and the hits are not fragments:

  • Entergy Charitable Foundation appends a Part XV table with every organization's name, street address, city, state, zip, purpose, relationship and amount.
  • M&B Lowry Foundation appends a check register: date, check number, recipient, amount, totalling $53,750.
  • One family foundation appends a rotated landscape scholarship list naming every individual recipient, totalling $144,000.

The last two totals match our database to the dollar, which is how you know you are looking at the real Part XV list and not some other table.

The other seven are genuinely empty. We rendered every page of two of them. Foellinger Foundation ($8.0 million) and the Jack Cayre Foundation ($2.1 million) both print "SEE ATTACHMENT" and then give you the form, some routine tax schedules, and a blank Schedule B. There is nothing behind it to find. Our Richmond foundation is in this group: twenty four pages, no schedule.

So the honest version is this. The list is public roughly two times in five, sitting in an image-only scan that no directory in the country has read. The rest of the time it was never published at all.

How much money this covers

Across our whole corpus, counting only filings where the recipient field points at an attachment rather than naming anyone:

  • 13,197 placeholder rows across 12,739 separate filings, 2018 through 2025
  • 3,778 foundations file at least one
  • $45.6 billion in grants sits behind them
  • 1,651 of those foundations, 44%, are fully suppressed, with not one itemized grant on record
  • The top 25 hold 51% of the hidden dollars

That last number is the useful one. This is not a fog spread evenly over the sector. Half of it is concentrated in twenty five large, quiet foundations, and those are disproportionately the ones worth knowing about.

Why it matters to you specifically

Say you run a children's services nonprofit in Richmond. You search for foundations funding organizations like yours. The one giving away $900,000 a year to exactly your field, in exactly your city, does not appear, because as far as every database in the country is concerned it has named four grantees and given away $550.

It is not that the tool missed it. The information was never published in a form anything can read.

And there is a second-order version of this that is worse. If you count that foundation's grants naively, you get "one grant of $966,600." A foundation that appears to write a single enormous check looks unreachable, so you skip it. We had to build a rule into our own analysis to throw these rows out of every median and every grant count, because leaving them in makes small foundations look like giants.

What is actually behind the placeholder

We got curious and went looking for one.

The last time most 990-PF filers submitted on paper was fiscal year 2019, the year before the e-file mandate took full effect. Those returns were scanned with their attachments intact. So we pulled the 2019 paper filing for the Richmond foundation, and the schedule was right there, two pages headed "2019 Grant Distribution":

  • 41 grantees
  • $854,000 total
  • $20,000 median grant
  • Range of exactly $10,000 to $50,000
  • Every row carrying the recipient's name, EIN and full street address

Boys and Girls Clubs of Metro Richmond, $50,000. Art 180, $11,500. Church Hill Activities and Tutoring, $20,000. Greater Richmond SCAN, $25,000. Forty one organizations, none of them getting a life-changing sum, all of them getting a real one.

That is an extremely fundable profile, and it had been sitting behind four words ever since.

The letter that still works

Here is the part nobody tells small nonprofits.

Under Internal Revenue Code section 6104(d), a private foundation must make its three most recent annual returns available for public inspection, including all schedules and attachments. You can request a copy in writing, and the foundation has 30 days to send it. They may charge reasonable copying and postage costs. This is not a favor and it is not a loophole. It is the same statute that puts the return online in the first place.

Worth knowing: unlike public charities, private foundations cannot redact their contributor list either. The disclosure obligation on them is unusually complete.

So for the roughly three in five where the PDF has nothing, the recipient list is still not gone. It is just not on the internet. It is available to anyone willing to write one letter, and almost nobody writes the letter.

If you want to try it, keep it boring and specific:

I am requesting a copy of the Form 990-PF for [foundation name], EIN [number], for fiscal years [years], including all attachments and schedules referenced in Part XV. I understand you may charge reasonable copying and postage fees. Please let me know the amount and I will remit it.

Send it to the address on the front of the filing. Do not pitch your organization in the same letter. This is a records request, and mixing it with an ask turns a routine obligation into a decision someone has to make about you.

The honest limit

I want to be careful not to oversell what we can do about this.

Where the IRS never published the list, nobody can show it to you, us included. Where it was published as a scan, reading it is an OCR problem across tens of thousands of pages, and we are working on it rather than claiming it is done.

What we can do today is tell you the difference between "this foundation has no grant history" and "this foundation's grant history is suppressed," which are wildly different facts that look identical in every directory I have used. The first means move on. The second means go and get it, by PDF or by letter, because there are 41 organizations behind it and the fact that it is inconvenient is exactly why your competitors have not looked.

Most of what makes grant research hard is not that the information is secret. It is that the information is public in a form nobody has bothered to read.

If you want to start from the foundations that did name their grantees, peer search works backwards from an organization like yours to the funders that have already written that kind of check.