What do St. Jude’s IRS Form 990 filings from 2017–2024 show about year‑by‑year allocations to program services, fundraising, and reserves?
Executive summary
St. Jude’s publicly posted Form 990s for fiscal years 2017–2024 show a consistent disclosure pattern: the bulk of expenses are reported as program services, fundraising appears as a distinct functional expense line, and net assets/reserves are reported on the balance-sheet schedules — but the provided reporting set does not include a clean, already‑tabulated year‑by‑year percentage table, so exact year‑to‑year percentage comparisons require pulling the numbers from each PDF return (St. Jude’s filings are available on its site and as IRS/Form 990 documents) [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. What the 990s disclose about program services
Each Form 990 for St. Jude contains the Part I/Part III expense breakdown and Schedule O commentary that identifies program services (research, patient care, outreach) as the organization’s primary mission expenditures; across the filings the largest single expense category shown on the form is program services, consistent with the hospital’s stated mission (these program totals are reported on the main Form 990 pages and reconstructed in the IRS raw filings) [1] [5] [6].
2. How fundraising appears on the returns
Fundraising is recorded separately in the Form 990 functional expense schedules — donors can see line items for fundraising costs and separate disclosures for fundraising activities — and the publicly posted PDFs and machine‑readable IRS data make those fundraising expense lines accessible in each year’s return (the Form 990 layout and instructions make fundraising a distinct functional classification that organizations must report) [2] [7].
3. What the 990s show about reserves, net assets and “fund balances”
Net assets or fund balances (often discussed publicly as “reserves”) are reported on Form 990’s balance-sheet sections and in Schedule D where applicable; St. Jude’s filings include net assets figures and any related disclosures about board‑designated funds or long‑term investment holdings, but the public summaries in the sources here point only to the presence of those schedules rather than supplying a pre‑compiled year‑by‑year reserve trend in the provided reporting (readers must consult each year’s PDF to extract the numeric sequence) [2] [7] [3].
4. Limits of the public reporting and why there isn’t a simple one‑line answer in these sources
The documents and databases cited (St. Jude’s site PDFs and ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer) are the authoritative originals and reconstructed raw data, but the set of search results supplied notes that “extracted financial data is not available” for some filings and that bulk PDFs must be opened to obtain year‑specific numbers — meaning the packaged reporting here documents where and how St. Jude reports program, fundraising and net asset figures but does not itself present an aggregated 2017–2024 table of allocations without manual extraction from each Form 990 [8] [9] [10] [5].
5. Balanced interpretation and next research steps
Taken at face value, the returns show St. Jude designates the majority of its expenses to program services year after year and discloses fundraising as a discrete expense, while net assets are reported and explained where material; critics who press about “large reserves” must point to the specific reserve lines and board designations in those schedules and compare them year‑by‑year — a precise percentage trend for 2017–2024 requires extracting the numeric program service totals, fundraising totals, and year‑end net asset balances from each year’s Form 990 PDF, which the organization and the IRS/nonprofit databases make available for verification (the filings themselves are the source documents for that exercise) [2] [1] [6].