Washington — The Internal Revenue Service announced on Thursday that the agency would soon send a questionnaire to roughly 400 colleges and universities to collect information on their executive compensation, endowments, and unrelated-business income.

The survey was included as part of the agency’s work plan for the 2008 fiscal year and is meant to identify how higher-education institutions are reporting financial data and if there are gaps in the information that need to be filled in, said Steven J. Pyrek, an IRS spokesman.

The announcement came less than a week after a spokesman for U.S. Sen. Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, told The Chronicle that the senator supported the creation of a new Form 990 tax schedule that was specifically geared to colleges and universities, and that required more reporting of colleges’ costs and enrollments. —Eric Kelderman