From Open Secrets: How do Dark Money Groups work?

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Many laws govern what a 501(c) organization, or Dark Money group, can do with its money and what it is required to report. While some expenditures, such as explicit political spending, must be publicly disclosed, many other expenditures remain off the radar screen.

Most of what we know about spending by Dark Money groups spending is gathered from their annual IRS 990 forms, including their major vendors and the organizations to which they give grants. As the example below illustrates, groups often submit only vague descriptions of their outlays to vendors, such as "media services" or "consulting phone programs." They are not obligated to say what the money purchased with any specificity.

These organizations can spend money on direct political advocacy, but that cannot be their primary purpose, which is usually determined by how much the group spent on politics as a proportion of their overall expenditures. Disclosure requirements mandate that 501(c) groups report direct political expenditures to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). But expenses earmarked as "educational" or "membership building" are considered part of the organization’s primary purpose and (most of the time) need not be detailed.

To help bring some clarity to this murky landscape, OpenSecrets is providing a few breakdowns here of the more than 1,500 annual Form 990 filings from more than 400 organizations we track. Keep in mind there is no way to systematically track all political spending by 501(c) organizations. Groups often use loopholes in the FEC regulations to buy web ads, mailers, and, in particular, to make large expenditures for ad production and TV air time without reporting it as such; that’s because, as long as their ads don’t contain an explicit call to vote for or against a candidate and they air more than 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election, there’s no FEC requirement for that spending to be reported. OpenSecrets regularly reveals this additional activity, but there is no component in the overall data that can be used to track it consistently and uniformly across the board. For this reason, the percentages reported here for many of the groups are conservative, because a significant portion of the largest groups' activities takes place outside the FEC’s reporting windows.

The chart below allows you to explore this spending; the data can be sorted by rank, organization, end date, total expenditures, political spending reported by a group to the IRS, political spending reported by a group to the FEC and the percentage of FEC-reported political spending with donors disclosed.