Where can donors find St. Jude’s audited financial statements and IRS Form 990 for transparency?
Executive summary
St. Jude publishes its annual IRS Form 990 and related financial PDFs on a dedicated financial-information section of its website, where donors can download current and past Form 990 filings and some audited statements [1] [2] [3]. Independent repositories — including ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer and the IRS bulk filing releases — also host St. Jude’s Form 990 documents and, in many cases, linked audit reports or metadata that point to audits [4] [5] [6].
1. Where to find St. Jude’s Form 990 on the organization’s website
St. Jude’s corporate site maintains a visible “financial information” area where PDF copies of its Form 990 returns are posted for multiple years (examples include 2017, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 filings) and are available for direct download from stjude.org [7] [8] [9] [1] [3]. Those PDFs are the public-disclosure copies of the IRS Form 990 that list revenues, expenses, executive compensation, and required schedules, and they are the primary source a donor should check first [1] [3].
2. Where donors can get Form 990s outside St. Jude’s site — IRS and ProPublica
The IRS releases Form 990 filings and has made bulk PDF and XML downloads available (with electronic filings and data releases described by the IRS and mirrored by third parties), and ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer aggregates those IRS records so users can search and download St. Jude’s Form 990s directly from ProPublica’s pages [5] [4]. ProPublica’s service points donors to the same IRS-sourced documents and often maintains historical filings back many years, making it a convenient mirror if a donor cannot find a particular PDF on the charity’s site [5] [4].
3. Where to find audited financial statements and audit reports
Audited financial statements — when St. Jude chooses to publish them — are commonly posted alongside or linked from the organization’s financial-information pages as part of the same PDF repository where Form 990s appear (examples on stjude.org indicate audited financials and schedules accompany returns in some years) [1] [2]. For nonprofit audits tied to federal award requirements, audit reports may also be available through the Federal Audit Clearinghouse or referenced in ProPublica’s listings when organizations have federal single audits; ProPublica notes it links to audit copies for organizations that spent $750,000 or more in federal grant money in a year [4] [5].
4. Third-party checkers and aggregators that point to both 990s and audits
Charity Navigator and other charity-rating sites routinely check an organization’s website for published audited financial statements and link to IRS Form 990 documents to inform their accountability assessments, and Instrumentl and similar services create simplified 990 reports from digitized filings to make the data easier to read [10] [11]. These third-party tools do not replace the primary documents but serve as useful navigation and interpretation aids for donors seeking to confirm that the audited financials and Form 990s are posted and current [10] [11].
5. Practical steps and limits for donors verifying transparency
The fastest verification route is to download St. Jude’s most recent Form 990 PDFs from the hospital’s financial-information page and then cross-check those filings against the IRS/ProPublica copies to ensure completeness; if an audited financial statement is not attached to the Form 990, Schedule O or Part XIII of the return will indicate whether an audit exists or why one wasn’t attached [1] [12]. Donors should be aware that bulk IRS data releases are more complete for electronically filed returns since 2017 and that not every audit is necessarily appended to a public Form 990, so consulting the Federal Audit Clearinghouse or contacting the charity’s finance office may be required for full audit reports [5] [4] [12].