Guidestar and Secretary of State corporation status not matching up
As part of our grant eligibility screen, I run the guidestar charity check before I move applications forward for review. Most all of the applicants checked out on Guidestar as "verified" but when I started building our grant agreements and sent them to our legal counsel for signature, legal counsel found two organizations that were considered in "delinquent" status on the Washington State Secretary of State corporations search. I did searches on all 14 nonprofit organizations that received a grant and 5 of them had delinquent status on the state website.
I contacted Foundant support and they said that all of the guidestar data comes to them from candid.com. When I searched delinquent orgs on the candid page, I did not see anything about their corporation status.
As a result, I can't solely rely on Guidestar when doing my due diligence reviews of the grantees.
I later found out that the secretary of state was behind in updating organizational status'. They were backlogged from September. The filing deadline was in October. Some of the organizations had to drive to the SOS location or call with SOS staff to get their status updated. Some of them still don't have Active status.
So the whole point of this post is to make foundations/funders aware that you shouldn't solely rely on Guidestar for current nonprofit corporation status. Checking your states secretary of state's website is another option. Washington State has a corporations and charities search webpage, not sure if other states have this. I welcome any thoughts and suggestions.
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If anyone is interested, you can see a summary of each state's requirements here: https://www.nasconet.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/NASCO-State-Charities-Registration-Survey-5.15.20-.pdf
This is more than two years out of date at this point, so you should definitely check with each state, separately.
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