provide invoices for tippers

[chadwhitacre]

Raised in IRC by @rodneyrehm. Helpful for those that want to pay from a business account.

[chadwhitacre]

I guess we would add downloadable PDF invoices to profile pages?

Would also like to have these send via email each week.

[timothyfcook]

At a later point, a consideration is whether or not Gittip could function as a 501c3 that validates all tips as tax-deductible donations. Have you thought about this at all? It might be tricky/impossible, but worth thinking about.

[chadwhitacre]

Gifts through Gittip are probably tax-free already (see #96). My hunch is that it would be much harder to get 501(c)(3) status for Gittip itself.

[timothyfcook]

Yeah, I don't think it will be an issue for a long time (if ever) that people would be taxed on their git tips. It is possible, however, that tippers could be able to deduct their gifts (donations) from their taxable earnings. At a certain point if some generous folks are tipping $100/month, they might be interested in writing those tips off of their taxes.

I don't think its totally unreasonable to make this happen. The MacArthur foundation's genius grants are funded by money that was seen as tax-deductible donations... yours is smaller amounts in larger quantities.

As far as non-profit status is concerned:

1. People "donate" money to gittip and, with their denote a recipient for a micro-grant who is "Making the world better".
2. Gittip accepts the money and packages it into bundled micro-grants for these do-gooders who are "making the world better".
3. The do-gooders receive the tips as a "micro-grant" of bundled tips and the tippers receive a tax receipt saying they "donated" $89.18 in 2012 to a number of micro-grant funds for everyday geniuses and do-gooders.

It seems like Gittip should be able to function like a crowd-sourced Foundation that accepts constant streams of both funding for micro-grants and votes on who should receive micro-grants.

Exploring the non-profit/tax-exempt status is not something for the early stages, but could be a consideration for the long-term. Having recently gotten this status myself (for @saxifrageschool) I think gittip could qualify.

[chadwhitacre]

Do MacArthur fellows have to pay tax on their grants as income? These are all questions for an accountant, of course.

[chadwhitacre]

501(c)(3) suggestion reticketed as #101.

[rodneyrehm]

I talked to a German accountant friend about this. Germany's policy on allowing tax-writeoffs on charity donations requires the recipient to be registered with the German tax office. As participants would not go through the hassle, It would have to be gittip doing that for them.

So in Germany there's currently no way to declare gittip payments as donations - even if you get some American status to cover that. Also the German tax authorities would not accept the payments to gittip as a business transaction, since no actual value was exchanged. Since we're talking peanut-amounts of money, they'd probably just ignore the transactions.

As for the receiving side, you'd have to add the received amount to your declared income.

I guess this makes gittip a little less interesting around here.

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks, @rodneyrehm. I've copied your comment to #96 and #101. I've also started making #101 less US-centric.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @elliottw in private email.

[elliottw]

i think i meant receipt but i was too sleepy to say the right word, but yeah.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @kennethreitz in private conversation and email.

[chadwhitacre]

Low-hanging fruit on this would be an HTML receipt linked from the history page. Step 2 would be PDF and step 3 would be email (in a post-#89 world).