Your firm signed the return. Someone else checks it. Keep both.
Your firm's File is every client foundation's 990-PF, read from the IRS, re-done line by line and sealed. Each carries nine controls in six words and the payout still open, by its date. The firm's seat is free. No money passes to the firm for its own clients. The facts for your reviewer are below.
Twenty firms prepared a third of the returns in the band.
One line on a firm's year-end request list reaches every foundation whose return it prepares.
Public data: the preparer firm as printed on each foundation’s own e-filed return, read 2026-09-26. No firm is named here; a firm sees its own File on request.
The foundation's sealed Filing Record, with the year's other requested documents.
Invoiced to the foundation, or to the firm at cost with no margin. One published price: $2,600 a foundation a year.
- The client foundation's 990-PF recomputed from the IRS's own file and sealed on request, each year chained to the last
- The distribution requirement and its due date, and the undistributed income Part XII carries
- A verification page anyone can check without us
- A read-only seat for the firm; the foundation keeps the record and takes it with it
The committee's decisions, the investment policy and its approvals, and board packs: those are the Foundation Record, bought by the foundation direct. A foundation can move to the Foundation Record at its band price at any time; its sealed filing years come with it.
Request list item: the foundation's sealed Filing Record (paretoalphasystems.com/verify).
What the client hands its next preparer, its auditor and its counsel.
The public filing shows the figures. It does not show what the committee saw, decided or approved, or on which numbers. The record does, and it is the foundation's, not the firm's work product.
The examination: The IRS asks about a year three chairs ago.
The new chair: Why is the spending rate what it is, and who set it?
The family: A dispute over a gift, and what the committee saw when it decided.
The auditor: How was that manager kept, on which numbers?
The attorney general: How was the restricted gift invested?
The next preparer: What did the last one file, and does this year's opening balance agree?
What the record holds when it is asked: the return as filed, re-done by a party that did not prepare it; each decision, the day it was made, the figures it rested on, and who approved it; a fingerprint anyone can check without us. It does not decide whether a standard was met. Counsel does. It makes sure the facts exist when counsel is asked.
The same arithmetic, on the draft, in your own browser.
Parts IX, X and XII added again line by line before signature: the short-year proration, the carryover in its order, what lapses with this return. Nothing you type is sent.
Read across six filed years, 3,274 of 10,947 foundations hold an excess distribution in its final year: applied on the next return, or gone. Each client’s sealed proof page reads its filed years in order. The totals are in the carryover-chain study.
Three things, in writing.
Two are quoted from the agreement a firm signs, where your firm is “the Firm”; the third is the seat.
No payments to the firm for its own clients
Through the firm
The seat
Behind the method: $100M+ in estate structures designed and signed off by counsel and CPAs; a $1B+ inter-banking dispute resolved on an audit; eighteen years running the numbers for multi-generational families. About
Who owns the record, who holds it, who pays, and who decides.
The owner
The host
The payer
The firm's seat
The decisions
The conclusions are your firm's. Our counsel has not yet reviewed this page.
- 01
The File
Every client foundation recomputed and sealed. Yours for the asking.
- 02
The facts for your reviewer
Owner, host, payer, seat, decisions: five facts on one page.
- 03
The request list
One line, your wording or ours.
- 04
The first client's page, kept
The foundation accepts the Terms and grants the firm's read seat.
Does it check our work?
It recomputes the return as filed from the figures the return itself reports, and states what agrees and what differs. A line that differs is a question for your team, not a finding; the return may reflect a treatment those figures do not show.
Is it an audit, review or compilation?
No. It is a recomputation of a public return and a sealed record of it. Your firm's professional judgment governs what it sends its clients.
Do you pay my firm anything?
Not for your attest or tax clients, not as a referral, not as a commission. The foundation keeps the record; your firm reads it. That is the first fact for your reviewer.
Who contacts our clients?
You do, if you choose. The agreement a firm signs says we do not start contact with a client foundation in its File, and its clients leave our outreach the day it signs.
What if we stop?
The foundation keeps its record and its seals. Every seal can be checked against the IRS's own file without us.
Ask for your firm's File.
A person replies within two business days, with the facts for your reviewer in writing.