The Golden Globes operate as a tax exempt charity. They used to have two tax exempt numbers: one for the HFPA and one for their charitable trust. Now I can tell you exclusively that in 2011, the IRS revoked the charitable trust for not filing reports for three years.
A rep for GuideStar, the organization that the IRS submits all charities to, says:
“The Hollywood Foreign Press Association Charitable Trust (EIN: 95-3735188) was automatically revoked by the IRS on July 13, 2011 for failure to file a Form 990 for 3 consecutive years. So, as of July 13, 2011, they were no longer a charity, can’t accept donations, etc.
This falls under the Pension Protection Act of 2006, which says that if a nonprofit doesn’t file something with the IRS (even if it’s a tiny bit of info) for 3 consecutive years, their tax-exempt status is automatically revoked. The first list of revoked orgs came out in June 2011, and there were 275K, and it’s been updated monthly thereafter.”
Knowing this, the other entity- HFPA– submitted a form 990 for 2012 in July 2013. On it, they claim to have donated $1,570,000 to the charitable trust. This is notated in two places on their Form 990 for 2012– on page 25 and page 32. There is no mistake. The HFPA donated $1,570,000 to, essentially, themselves.
Each entity has a different EIN (Employer Identification Number), too. And they are not similar in any way.
There is no record of where the money went after that because there is no filing for the Hollywood Foreign Press Charitable Trust.
The HFPA gets its tax free status by making donations between $1 million and $1.5 million every year from the $7 million annual fee paid to them by NBC for the Golden Globes show. Dick Clark Productions produces the show. Last year, The HFPA paid over $12 million in legal fees in a long running losing battle with DCP.
By the time they made their 2012 donations public in August 2012, their IRS status for the charitable trust had been revoked for over 13 months. In fact, when they made their 2011 donations in August of that year, the revocation had already happened.
