SAN FRANCISCO — State chartered credit unions in California got a reprieve from the annual chore of filing individual IRS Form 990s when the state's Department of Financial Institutions announced that, for at least one more year, it would file a group 990 form with the Internal Revenue Service on behalf of participating state-chartered credit unions.

Nonprofit organizations of all different stripes file 990 forms each year with the IRS. Because state-chartered credit unions do not share the automatic exemption from federal taxes that flows from the federal charter, they too have been required to file. In some states, regulators or sometimes credit union leagues have sought to ease this burden by filing group 990s on behalf of their state chartered institutions but that practice has been declining as state chartered CUs' ongoing concerns about their potential responsibilities under IRS unrelated business income tax policy have gone unresolved, according to Kathy Thompson, a senior vice president of compliance with CUNA.

"The thing many people need to remember is that the 990 form affects a great many more people and organizations than only credit unions," Thompson said, explaining that the IRS had sought to revise the form because it had last been changed in the late 1970s. "I think they had a sense that the old form was no longer capturing the sorts of information that they needed," she added.