There's a new learning alternative for tax practitioners, financial professionals, and others who have an interest in the tax matters relating to not-for-profit entities. Effective immediately, the Internal Revenue Service has begun offering its popular Exempt Organizations Workshop in an online format on the Internet.

The five modules of the workshop, which take approximately three hours to complete, can be accessed at www.stayexempt.org . These modules cover the following topics:

• Tax-exempt status - Learn what tax-exempt status is and what you need to know and do so that the organization won't lose its status.
• Unrelated business income - Learn which activities qualify as unrelated business income and how this income should be reported.
• Employment issues - Learn how different types of workers should be classified, what the tax withholding requirement are for those workers, and what types of payroll tax forms need to be filed.
• Form 990 - Learn when to file a Form 990, how the form should be filled out, and what happens when a tax-exempt organization gets audited by the IRS.
• Required disclosures - Learn which records of a tax-exempt organization need to be made available to the public and what type of information must be provided to donors so that they can take the appropriate tax deduction for their contributions.

Designed to appeal to small and mid-sized tax-exempt organizations, the workshop, "Stay Exempt – Tax Basics for 501(c)(3)s," is available at no charge. In particular, the IRS designed the workshop for organizations that have no tax experts on staff or that have limited access to outside tax advisors.

In addition to the workshop material, the Stay Exempt web site provides links to a variety of tax forms, including payroll tax forms, all of the Forms 990, and Form 1120-POL for political organizations. There are also links to many of the IRS publications, notices, and articles that might be of interest to exempt organizations.

The "Stay Exempt" course was originally launched in 2001 and has been offered by the IRS in a series of tax workshops across the country. The Stay Exempt web site is a product of the IRS’s office of Exempt Organizations.