Hopefully everyone has filed their personal tax returns, extensions, and maybe even received a big refund already. As a 501(c)3 tax exempt organization, the USM Foundation doesn't worry about the April 15th tax return deadline like most individuals. However, that doesn't mean we don't have tax payments and or reporting obligations with the IRS and various states. Just to let you know we feel your April 15th pain, here are some of the tax filing and reporting requirements we have:

• Biweekly, we collect and submit federal and state payroll withholding, social security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance taxes for all of our employees. This includes the employer's 7.65% contribution of social security and Medicare taxes we pay for each employee.
• For certain payments to foreign nationals we withhold 30% of their payment and submit this to the IRS.
• Every quarter, we file state sales tax returns to report and submit sales tax payments we've collected on the sales of taxable items.
•  Like many 501(c)3 organizations we have some activities that the IRS deems as taxable. This is called Unrelated Business Income and the related tax is referred to as UBIT (Unrelated Business Income Tax). We file federal tax returns and multiple state tax returns and pay both federal and state taxes with many of these returns.
• We have annual IRS reporting requirements for our employee benefit plans. This information is reported on Form 5500. The IRS also requires that the Financial Statements associated with our pension plan are audited each year.
• Annually we file 1099-Misc forms for payments for services to individuals that exceeded $600 during the year and we file 1099-R forms for payments we make to annuitants for the charitable annuities we manage.  
• We prepare individual trust tax returns for the trusts that we manage.
• The federal information return filed by most bigger 501(c)3's is the Form 990. Our Form 990 filing is over 50 pages long and includes a dozen schedules along with the 16 pages of the main form.

As you can see, tax exempt definitely does not mean tax-filing exempt. For the USM Foundation, April 15th is just one of many days throughout the year that we are "taxed" by the various federal and state tax requirements for tax-exempt organizations.