The Internal Revenue Service released an interim report July 19 summarizing responses from almost 500 tax-exempt hospitals to a May 2006 questionnaire about how they provide and report benefits to the community. The IRS is still in the process of analyzing the reported data.
According to the report, nearly all hospitals reported that they provided various types of community benefit that were the subject of the questionnaire. Although 97 percent of responding hospitals said they have a written uncompensated care policy, no uniform definition of what constitutes “uncompensated care” emerged from the responses. There also appear to be significant differences in the way other components of community benefit are reported.
The IRS’s hospital project team recommended developing a separate Form 990 schedule for hospitals as a way to address the lack of uniformity in definitions and reporting. A new Schedule H, Hospitals, is part of the recently released discussion draft of that form. Read the announcement.
