• webadict@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    This is wrong, and it’s wrong for obvious fucking reasons. Like Accounting 101 reasons. Like, go to prison for fraud reasons.

    Let’s say you own a business. You make sales and you partnered with a nonprofit for donations. You ask your customers to donate to that charity.

    When you take that money, you set it aside. It does not belong to your company, specifically because you wouldn’t want to inflate your profits or offset your losses with money you don’t have. If your company loses money and you took this money, then you wouldn’t even be able to write off the full amount you took because you wouldn’t have any taxable income.

    So, since this money isn’t yours, when you donate it, you do not write it off your company’s profits. Because it didn’t come from the company’s money because you don’t want that to touch your profits. If you do write that off, that’s a little something financial experts like to call fraud.

    But, let’s pretend you did take it, and counted it in your profits because you like to be stupid and risky. When you donate that money, you are writing off the portion of your profits that would have been added. So, even if you did donate that money yourself to write-off, you already took it as profits.

    This isn’t even a US thing. This shit wouldn’t be legal anywhere. If it was legal, then they could donation roulette to continuously donate the same dollar over and over to write off all of their taxable income, and, honestly, it would be easier to just buy art. Art is the real fucking tax scam.