What do the 2022 and 2023 IRS Form 990 filings for Shriners Hospitals for Children (Massachusetts and Colorado corporations) show about program vs. administrative spending?
Executive summary
The 2022 and 2023 IRS Form 990 filings for Shriners Hospitals for Children are publicly available through multiple nonprofit data aggregators and the organization’s own site, but the sources provided here do not include extracted line-by-line totals that allow a definitive program-versus-administrative spending ratio to be reported within this analysis [1] [2] [3]. The filings must be examined directly—especially Schedule H entries and the combined financial statements—to calculate program service expenses versus management and general/supporting expenses; the reporting supplied points researchers to those documents but does not itself summarize those specific comparisons [4] [5].
1. What the available reporting actually shows about access to the filings
Public repositories confirm that Form 990 documents for Shriners Hospitals for Children exist for the relevant years and are hosted both by the IRS digitized releases and third‑party services such as ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, CauseIQ, Instrumentl, and Charity Navigator, while the Shriners organization publishes copies and a combined financial statement on its transparency pages [1] [2] [4] [6] [3] [5]. These listings establish provenance and allow download of the full Form 990 PDFs for the Massachusetts and Colorado corporations that together cover the U.S. network of hospitals, but the aggregated summaries available in the cited indexes are oriented toward locating filings rather than reporting granular program vs. admin tallies [1] [2] [3].
2. Why program vs. administrative spending isn’t already summarized in the supplied sources
Form 990s are complex documents: for hospitals, Schedule H captures facility-specific program service revenue and allocable facility administrative costs, and the IRS provides instructions for distinguishing facility costs from central administrative costs [7]. The third‑party pages cited here primarily index or host the returns and sometimes show high‑level totals, but none of the provided snippets or pages in the search results include the extracted Schedule H line items or a precomputed program‑service‑expense versus management/general expense breakdown for 2022 and 2023 that can be quoted directly [1] [2] [4].
3. Organizational structure that complicates simple comparisons
Shriners Children’s files under two U.S. corporate entities—one Massachusetts corporation covering Boston and New England hospitals and one Colorado corporation covering the remaining U.S. hospitals—and the organization also publishes a combined financial statement for all hospitals, which means a single Form 990 will not necessarily reflect all hospitals or match the combined statements without reconciliation [3] [5]. This dual‑corporation structure means program vs. administrative ratios can differ between the two filings and the combined financials, and any fair comparison requires pulling the Schedule H and Statement of Functional Expenses from each filing to align like‑for‑like categories [3] [5].
4. What a researcher must do to obtain the program/administrative split
To answer the question with authority, one must download the full Form 990 PDFs (or the IRS raw XML reconstructions) for the Massachusetts and Colorado corporations for fiscal years ending 2022 and 2023 and extract: total program service expenses, total management/general expenses, and supporting detail on allocated facility administrative costs (Schedule H) and functional expense statements; the pages and download links indicated by ProPublica, CauseIQ, Instrumentl, and the Shriners financials page provide the route to those documents [1] [2] [4] [3]. Only after extracting those line items can precise percentages or dollar comparisons be computed; the current reporting points to the filings but does not itself deliver those computed figures [1] [4].
5. Alternative viewpoints and potential motives in public discussion
Public summaries and ratings services (e.g., Charity Navigator, Instrumentl) may emphasize accountability metrics or grant activity in ways that shape public perception without presenting the full schedule‑level detail, and the Shriners organization’s own transparency pages understandably frame documents to highlight mission impact while noting that the two U.S. 990s do not include Canadian and Mexican entities—an important caveat when interpreting any single filing [6] [3] [5]. Reporters, donors, or critics seeking a quick “program vs. admin” headline should be cautious: the authoritative source is the Form 990s and Schedule H themselves, which are available via the cited links but were not reduced to the specific comparative numbers in the materials provided for this analysis [1] [4] [7].