Family Foundations and What They Disclose
A private family foundation is paradoxically the most public part of a wealthy estate. The vehicle is established for philanthropic purposes, and its public-benefit nature is the reason its filings are open in a way that the rest of the family's holdings are not. Most settlors understand this in the abstract and underestimate it in the particular.
In the United States, the Form 990-PF is filed annually by every private foundation, as required under the United States Internal Revenue Code. The 990-PF is open to public inspection. It is republished by ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, by GuideStar, and by Foundation Directory Online, and the historical filings of any meaningful US-based private foundation are easily retrievable across the past two decades.
The 990-PF contains: the names and titles of trustees and officers; the names of disqualified persons (which include substantial contributors and members of the contributor's family); aggregated and itemised lists of grants paid, by recipient and amount; investment income broken out by source; capital gains and losses; aggregate fair-market values of investment positions; and the names of officers paid more than threshold amounts. The aggregated effect of these disclosures, read across multiple years, draws a portrait of family connections, philanthropic priorities, financial scale, and investment behaviour that a wholly private estate would not disclose.
In the United Kingdom, the Charity Commission for England and Wales maintains public-register filings for every registered charity above the relevant threshold. The trustees are named. The annual accounts are filed and indexed. The areas of activity are stated. Above a higher threshold the auditor is named. The register is searchable and downloadable, and the trustees' previous and concurrent appointments are searchable across the register, which means that a trustee on one family foundation is reachable from filings of every other foundation they sit on.
Liechtenstein, by contrast, holds family-foundation records in a register that is closed to public inspection in the ordinary case. This is a defensible choice for a family that has decided that disclosure of its philanthropic activity is not part of how it wishes to be read; it has its own consequences for the public reading of the family's character.
A grantmaking family foundation, taken across ten years of 990-PF filings, will typically have named one or more relatives as trustees, made identifiable grants to schools and universities attended by family members or children of family members, made identifiable grants to medical institutions in cities where the family lives or treats illness, and shown an investment-allocation pattern that mirrors how the underlying family wealth is invested more broadly. The combined picture is not the picture of philanthropic anonymity that most settlors imagine.
For families that wish to give privately, the choice is not whether to disclose. The choice is whether to give through a foundation that discloses by law, through a donor-advised fund that discloses far less, through a private operating foundation with narrower public-benefit reporting, or through pseudo-private structures in jurisdictions with closed registers. Each of those choices is itself readable by the public records that survive, and the choice of structure is one of the most legible signals a sophisticated family makes about its preferences around being read.
The work, in this category, is to read what a family's foundation already discloses, to identify what reading those disclosures permits, and to advise on the structural choices that match the family's actual preferences around how it wishes its philanthropy to be reachable.