Help a Canadian give with a tax-deduction by swapping donations with them!
By Robert_Wiblin @ 2014-12-16T00:05 (+5)
TL;DR: If you are in the UK or USA, and are planning to give to the Against Malaria Foundation, you can help a Canadian make their donation to a different effective organisation tax deductible. Please let us know in the comments so we can facilitate more of these swaps.
Unfortunately many charities people here may want to give to are not registered charities in Canada or Australia, as becoming registered there is challenging and the number of donors available in those countries is not as large as in the UK or USA.
Tides Canada, a 'fiscal sponsor', used to allow Canadians to make grants to charities in other countries, but for logistical reasons have not offered this service for a while.
However, there is a way Canadians can still make tax deductible donations by 'pairing off' with someone who is planning to give to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) in the US or UK. This takes advantage of the fact that AMF is directly tax-deductible in Canada.
- The donor in the UK or US who was going to give to AMF, instead gives to the charity the Canadian wishes to give to.
- The Canadian donor gives the same amount to AMF instead.
undefined @ 2014-12-16T09:01 (+4)
Unfortunately, as far as I know, no popular effective altruist charities are registered in Australia yet, so I don't think this is possible to do there.
Also note that even if there were a tax-deductible EA charity in Australia, it's not at all clear that your donation to the Australian charity would be tax deductible if your actual purpose was to donate via a swap to a non-tax-deductible charity.
undefined @ 2014-12-20T10:25 (+1)
I'd be surprised if the Australian government has made a law about what your purpose in doing an otherwise legal act (donating to an Australian charity) is :)
undefined @ 2015-06-03T16:48 (+4)
I'm afraid you'd be surprised by large parts of the tax code, which I think can only be described as "perverse."
If you make an agreement "I'll do X if in exchange you do Y," that isn't even a perverse case. Obviously the tax code will treat that differently than doing X without any expectation of reciprocity, and the treatment depends on Y. E.g., if Y is "give a scholarship to my child," then this probably isn't going to be taxed as a donation, even though both X and Y could be deductible in isolation.
undefined @ 2014-12-16T00:27 (+2)
It might be good to have Charity Science coordinate this, as they're trying to expand tax deductibility in Canada.
undefined @ 2014-12-16T00:31 (+1)
Very happy to hand this over to CS! I am looking for people to pair donations with for donations to CEA, so will keep an eye on the thread though. :)
undefined @ 2014-12-16T17:37 (+1)
Commenting here to express my willingness to participate, however this pans out. I expect my contribution won't be more than a couple hundred dollars.
undefined @ 2014-12-16T05:06 (+1)
Note that doing this is completely legal
Would it still be completely legal if there was a more automatic and markety way of organizing this, such as certificates of impact? At what point does a system of exchange become too much like money and hence taxable?
undefined @ 2014-12-16T00:27 (+1)
I'm going to be donating ~$1K to AMF (Update: now $1.5k) from the US in early January 2015. Please let me know how I can help.