Salary data is public information

Nearly all Montana hospitals are nonprofit organizations — and that means salaries and other compensation for their top executives and highest-paid physicians are public information.

The information is on the groups’ federal 990 tax forms, which are available online through www.guidestar.org, a group that posts nonprofit organizations’ tax forms for the three most recent years.

The tax forms aren’t filed until about 11 months after the end of a group’s fiscal year, so the information isn’t current. For example, if a Montana hospital’s fiscal year is a calendar year, the most recent available form is 2009, because the 2010 form won’t be filed until sometime in November.

Each year’s form lists the full compensation for top executives and highest-paid employees at the hospital, or whatever nonprofit organization you’d like to examine. If you know the hospital name, you can type it into the www.guidestar.org search function, click on its name when it comes up, and then go to the “Forms 990 and docs” tab, which gives you a choice of which form you’d like to view.