Okay, cool.
It is not stupid! Non profit or for profit still have to have some figures for the IRS. I do not know how to go about getting them, and researching them. Several here over the years do know. It is important. I doubt many contributed, but, I am reminded there is CMJA is innocent board, sigh. So who knows? Every little step is important!
I posted a few minutes ago before reading this.
I do feel qualified to answer as I am a CPA with more than 15 years experience as finance director at various non profit organizations.
The IRS has strict guidelines for qualification as a charity or non-profit and an application must be submitted to the IRS for approval using this status (501(c)3). There is no way, under any stretch of the imagination, that any activity associated with funds for CMJA would qualify for 501(c)3 status. Thus the account associated with collecting money for her artwork, Tshirts and donations must be under the name of an individual or maybe even a business; what is important is that there is a bank account and a PayPal account that has a tax ID associated with it to collect these funds.
The IRS has become much more sophisticated in being able to track unreported income due to the use of computers and requiring financial institutions and businesses to report certain transactions. Banks have to report all wire transfers $10,000 and over; this was initially done as part of the war on drugs, but the information is now used by the IRS as well. PayPal automatically reports annual cash receipts for vendor accounts (they type of account that would be used on behalf of CMJA) over $20,000, IIRC.
The IRS then uses its computers to total up all the income reported to a particular tax ID number and match it against the tax return on file for that same ID number. If there is no return or the income is too low, the computer system automatically generates an IRS notice which is sent to the taxpayer. Typically these notices are generated in the first three months of the new year after the return was filed. Congress has been working to get laws passed to have the IRS perform this computer number matching in real time, to cut down on the delay between filing and sending notices.
As far as her account at the MCSO is concerned, I am not quite sure if they have any reporting requirements, but I would suspect that they do. The situation may not come up very often, but being a government agency, they sure do not want to see people evading taxes.
OK, OK, ...this is probably more than you wanted to know. Sorry