grantcheck

Federal Grant Readiness Check — one command, no account, public data.

An organization spends six weeks and forty hours of staff time on a federal application. The narrative is good. The budget ties out. Two days before the deadline someone tries to submit through Grants.gov and finds out the registration in SAM.gov expired in March, or that the Unique Entity ID was never issued in the first place, or that the IRS automatically revoked the 501(c)(3) exemption three years ago because nobody filed the 990 after the bookkeeper left.

None of those are close calls. Every one is a hard stop — the application cannot be submitted, or it is submitted and rejected without review. And every one of them is a matter of public record that takes seconds to look up. They only turn into disasters because they are scattered across four different federal systems that do not talk to each other, and because nobody checks them at the start of the process when there is still time to fix them.

grantcheck is the pre-flight check. You give it an Employer Identification Number, it reads the public federal record, and it hands back a one-page readiness report: is the exemption live, was it ever revoked, when was the last Form 990 filed and how close is the organization to the next automatic revocation, is the SAM.gov registration current, does a UEI exist, and is this organization sitting on the wrong side of the single audit threshold without knowing it.

It takes about two seconds. It runs before the go/no-go meeting, not after the proposal is written.

60-second quickstart

You need uv. If you do not have it:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Then run the tool. There is nothing to install, no account to create, and no key to obtain:

uvx grantcheck --ein 27-1067272

That is the whole quickstart. The first run downloads a small slice of the prebuilt public-data index (a few megabytes, covering the EIN range you asked about) and caches it locally. Subsequent runs on the same range are instant and work offline.

Other things you will want:

uvx grantcheck --ein 27-1067272 --format markdown   # paste into a memo
uvx grantcheck --ein 27-1067272 --format json       # pipe into something else
uvx grantcheck --name "Code for America" --state CA # look up the EIN first
uvx grantcheck refresh                              # pull the newest monthly IRS data
uvx grantcheck explain auto_revocation              # what a specific check actually means

What the report looks like

$ grantcheck --ein 27-1067272

  CODE FOR AMERICA LABS                                          EIN 27-1067272
  San Francisco, CA · NTEE W20 · 501(c)(3) public charity

  READY TO APPLY                                        1 item needs attention

  TAX EXEMPTION
  ✔  Exempt status          501(c)(3), unconditional exemption   ruling 2010-06
  ✔  Pub 78 deductibility   Listed — PC (public charity)         as of 2026-08-11
  ✔  Auto-revocation        No revocation on record              as of 2026-08-11
  ✔  Organization type      Public charity, not a private foundation

  FILING HEALTH
  ✔  Most recent Form 990   Tax period ending 2024-12-31         filed 2025-11-07
  ✔  Years since filing     1  (automatic revocation triggers at 3 consecutive missed years)

  FEDERAL REGISTRATION
  ✔  SAM.gov registration   Active, assistance and contracts     as of 2026-08-29
  ✔  Registration expires   2027-03-14                           196 days out
  ✔  Unique Entity ID       KX7TLM4NBQF3

  AUDIT POSTURE
  ⚠  Single audit           Government grants reported: $2,140,338 on the FY2024 Form 990.
                            That is above the $1,000,000 single audit threshold. If any
                            material portion of it is federal, a single audit is likely
                            required. Confirm against your Schedule of Expenditures of
                            Federal Awards.

  ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Sources: IRS EO Business Master File and Publication 78 (2026-08-11) · IRS
  Automatic Revocation List (2026-08-11) · IRS Form 990 e-file index (2026-07-20) ·
  SAM.gov Entity Management (2026-08-29). Matched to SAM by legal name + state,
  confidence high. Pin the match with --uei if it is wrong.

  This is informational only, derived from public data on the dates shown. It is
  not an eligibility determination, and not legal, tax, or accounting advice.
  Verify against the official source before relying on it.

And when something is actually broken, it says so first and stops burying it:

$ grantcheck --ein 94-2614101

  SECOND HARVEST OF SILICON VALLEY                               EIN 94-2614101
  San Jose, CA · NTEE K31 · 501(c)(3) public charity

  NOT READY — 2 blocking items

  ✘  SAM.gov registration   Expired 2026-05-02.
                            Federal applications cannot be submitted while a
                            registration is expired. Renewal is free and takes
                            10–15 business days. Start at https://sam.gov.

  ✘  Auto-revocation        Exemption automatically revoked 2023-05-15 for three
                            consecutive years of non-filing. No reinstatement is
                            recorded as of 2026-08-11. Reinstatement is by
                            Form 1023 or 1023-EZ; retroactive reinstatement has
                            deadlines. See IRS Rev. Proc. 2014-11.

Status, v0.1.0. The tax exemption and filing health checks are live and run against the real IRS datasets. The three SAM.gov checks report "not checked" until the SAM.gov entity snapshot is added to the published index, and the single audit screen reports the threshold that applies to your fiscal year but cannot yet tell you what you expended — that figure comes from the Form 990 e-file XML, which is not in the index yet. Every check says which of those it is rather than guessing.

The two blocks above are illustrative. They show the shape and tone of the output, not values fetched live for this document. Run the command yourself for current figures.

What it checks, and what each check actually means

Each check has a longer plain-English explainer:

uvx grantcheck explain single_audit

Data sources and how fresh they are

Every line of output carries the vintage of the data it came from, and grantcheck refresh tells you what changed. If a report does not say "as of," treat it as a bug and open an issue.

Live opportunity matching (optional)

When a readiness check comes back clean, the report can end with grant opportunities currently open to that organization, matched on its EIN, NTEE code, and state. This calls the OpenGrants matching API and requires OPENGRANTS_API_KEY in your environment or .env. See .env.example for where to get one.

Without it, grantcheck is complete and does everything described above. The enrichment call is wrapped so that a missing key, an expired key, or a network failure degrades silently — the readiness report still prints. Enriched lines are marked — live from OpenGrants so you always know which facts came from public federal data and which came from an API.

Credits

grantcheck reads federal public data, but the work of making that data tractable was done by other people first, over years, mostly unpaid.

• Nonprofit Open Data Collective — the IRS E-file Master Concordance File is the crosswalk that makes Form 990 XML readable across the hundreds of schema versions the IRS has published. We use it for the filing-date and government-grants slice of the report. Without it that part of this tool would not exist.
• GivingTuesday 990 Data Programme — form-990-xml-mapper and form-990-xml-parser, plus the Form 990 Variable Dictionary, which we used to validate our field selections.
• irsx / 990-xml-reader by Jacob Fenton — the reference implementation for reading IRS e-file XML in Python.
• ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer — used for gap-filling lookups and as a cross-check on our own parsing, under their data terms of use.
• propublica990 and open990odl — prior art we read closely before writing anything.

Where we find a bug or a gap in any of the above, we open the pull request upstream before we work around it here, and we record it in docs/research/prior-art.md.

Hosted version

check.opengrants.io runs the same checks in a browser with no install, and gives every organization a permanent, citable page at /ein/27-1067272. Same data, same vintages, same disclosure. The design is documented in docs/hosted/architecture.md.

Using it from an AI agent

grantcheck ships an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server exposing the same checks as tools, so an assistant can run a readiness check as part of a longer conversation:

uvx grantcheck mcp

The core logic lives in a library module. The command line and the MCP server are both thin adapters over it, so they cannot drift apart.

What this will never be

Read docs/NON-GOALS.md before opening a feature request. It is short and it is specific, and it will save you the trouble of writing a good proposal we are going to decline.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. There is a good first issue section written for people who know nonprofit compliance cold and have never opened a terminal. Those are the contributions this project needs most.

Disclosure

This is informational only, derived from public data on the dates shown. It is not an eligibility determination, and not legal, tax, or accounting advice. Verify against the official source before relying on it.

License

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE for the full text and NOTICE for upstream attribution.

Built and maintained by Egeria Corporation, sponsored by OpenGrants.