Reading the Assyrian Aid Society’s Form 990s: What the Filings Show, and What They Don’t, About Nineveh Plain Money, 2019–2024

Every diaspora donor who writes a check to an Assyrian charity eventually asks the same question: did this money reach the Nineveh Plain? It is the right question. It is also a question that a Form 990, read alone, cannot answer. What the public filings of the Assyrian Aid Society of America (AAS-A, EIN 94-3147517) do establish for fiscal years 2019 through 2024 is a financial profile — revenue, expenses, net assets, and the composition of each. What they do not establish, at least in the summary data most donors encounter, is a village-by-village or project-by-project ledger. The honest reading is to take the forms for what they are: an accountability document about totals and governance, not a map of where dollars landed.

What the filings actually show

ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer page for AAS-A (EIN 94-3147517, tax exemption issued December 1992) publishes extracted financial data from each year’s Form 990. The figures below are drawn directly from that page and should be read as reported totals, not as program allocations.

For the fiscal year ending December 2019, AAS-A reported revenue of $965,779 and expenses of $632,134. In FY2020, revenue was $931,509 against expenses of $658,927. FY2021 showed revenue of $843,543 and expenses of $805,318. FY2022 reported revenue of $1,044,748 and expenses of $1,179,638. FY2023 was the outlier year: revenue of $2,096,877 against expenses of $1,411,292. And in FY2024, revenue was $1,296,620 with expenses of $1,519,694. All figures are from the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer summary for AAS-A.

Two patterns stand out. First, contributions dominate revenue every year. In FY2024, contributions were $1,240,475, or 95.7 percent of total revenue, per the same source. That is consistent with a diaspora-funded charity whose income depends on individual and community giving rather than program-service contracts. Second, salaries and wages are a small share of expenses. In FY2024, other salaries and wages were $61,292, or 4.0 percent of total expenses, and executive compensation was reported as $0 in the extracted data. Officers are listed at $0 compensation across the years reviewed. These are the kinds of ratios a donor can legitimately use as a first filter: is the organization stable, is revenue concentrated in contributions, are administrative costs proportionate?

Where the summary stops

Here is the line the forms draw, and it matters for anyone tempted to treat a 990 as proof of geographic delivery. The ProPublica summary financials show totals. They do not break out spending by country, region, or project. ProPublica itself notes that its data release “includes only a subset of what can be found in the full Form 990s,” and that full filings are linked as PDFs and digital copies wherever possible. The AAS-A page links the full Form 990 and schedules for each year. Schedule F (foreign activities) appears in the linked filings for all six fiscal years reviewed. Schedule I (grants) appears in the linked filings for fiscal years 2021 through 2024; the FY2019 and FY2020 filings on the ProPublica page list Schedule F but no Schedule I, and the FY2020 filing is available as XML only, with no PDF. Those schedules are where a geographic question would begin to be answered — but their contents are not reproduced in the summary text, and this article does not assert what they list.

That is not a dodge. It is the central point. A donor who wants to know whether a specific contribution reached Tel Skuf, or Alqosh, or a displacement camp near Dohuk, will not find that answer in the extracted revenue and expense lines. The donor will need the Schedule F and Schedule I line items and, ideally, the organization’s own project reports. Those documents exist as links on the ProPublica page; reading them is the next step, not a conclusion this article can supply.

A worked example of what the forms can and cannot do

Suppose a diaspora donor gave $100,000 to AAS-A in a year and wants to trace it to a named Nineveh Plain village. The 990 summary can tell the donor the organization’s total revenue that year, its total expenses, and the share of revenue from contributions. It cannot tell the donor that $100,000, or any portion of it, was spent in that village. To get closer, the donor would need to open the PDF filing for that fiscal year, read Schedule F for foreign activities and Schedule I for grants to foreign organizations, and cross-reference any project-level reporting the organization publishes. This is a hypothetical illustration of method, not a claim about what those schedules contain.

The same discipline applies to third-party aggregators. Kindora, an independent nonprofit-data tool, states AAS-A’s mission as “aid to assyrian refugees and needy assyrians in iraq” and reports a 93 percent program expense ratio for tax year 2024, while noting that the organization has not reviewed the page. That ratio is a useful lead. It is not a substitute for the filing, and it says nothing about geography. Instrumentl’s page on AAS-A displays “total giving” and grantee figures, but the page itself labels some data as sample or preview and paywalls the grantee lists; those numbers should be treated as prompts to verify against the actual 990, not as findings.

What the public record does not support

It is worth being explicit about the claims this article is not making. The retrieved summary data does not show how much of AAS-A’s 2019–2024 spending went to the Nineveh Plain specifically. It does not show what Schedule F or Schedule I list. It does not establish program effectiveness or delivery quality. And it does not support extrapolating from the organization’s earlier emergency-response blog posts — such as the June 2014 note on aid to displaced families of the Nineveh Plain, or the December 2014 account of a Dohuk-area village hosting families from Tel Skuf — to spending in the 2019–2024 period. Those posts are dated records of an earlier moment; they are not a ledger for the years under review.

This is where informed urgency belongs, and where alarmism does not. The absence of project-level geographic detail in the summary data is a real limitation for diaspora accountability. It is also a normal feature of how Form 990 summary data is published. The responsible response is not to infer misconduct from a gap, nor to treat a program-expense ratio as proof of delivery. It is to ask the organization for the schedules and project reports that would close the gap, and to read them when they are available.

A practical checklist for reading any Assyrian charity’s 990

First, match the fiscal year to the program year. A Form 990 for the year ending December 2023 describes that fiscal year, not the calendar year a donor may have in mind. Second, distinguish contributions from program-service revenue. A charity funded overwhelmingly by contributions, as AAS-A is in the years reviewed, is answering to donors rather than to contracts, and its reporting should be read with that in mind. Third, treat third-party aggregator figures as leads to verify against the filing, not conclusions. Fourth, go to Schedule F and Schedule I and the PDF for any geographic question; the summary will not carry it. Fifth, ask for project-level reports where the schedules are aggregated. And sixth, keep the distinction between what a document shows and what one hopes it shows.

The Assyrian Aid Society of America’s filings for 2019–2024 show a diaspora-funded organization with contribution-driven revenue, modest salary costs, and year-to-year variation in both income and spending. They do not, in the summary data, show where in the Nineveh Plain those dollars went. That answer lives in the schedules and the project reports — and the work of accountability is to go read them, not to assume the summary has already said what it has not.

Frequently asked questions

Does the Form 990 show how much AAS-A spent in the Nineveh Plain? Not in the summary data published by ProPublica. The summary shows total revenue, expenses, and their composition. Geographic allocation would appear, if at all, in Schedule F and Schedule I and in the full PDF filing, whose contents are not reproduced in the summary.

What do the 2019–2024 revenue and expense figures show? They show year-by-year totals: revenue of $965,779 in FY2019, $931,509 in FY2020, $843,543 in FY2021, $1,044,748 in FY2022, $2,096,877 in FY2023, and $1,296,620 in FY2024; expenses of $632,134, $658,927, $805,318, $1,179,638, $1,411,292, and $1,519,694 respectively, per ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.

Is a high program-expense ratio proof that money reached the field? No. A program-expense ratio, such as the 93 percent figure Kindora reports for tax year 2024, describes the share of expenses classified as program rather than administrative. It does not establish geography or delivery.

Where can a donor find the schedules? The ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer page for AAS-A links the full Form 990 and schedules for each fiscal year. Schedule F appears in the linked filings for all six years reviewed. Schedule I appears in the linked filings for fiscal years 2021 through 2024; the FY2019 and FY2020 filings on the page list Schedule F but no Schedule I, and the FY2020 filing is available as XML only, with no PDF. Those are the documents to read for a geographic question.