[Foundation-l] Priorities

Ray Saintonge saintonge at telus.net
Tue Oct 23 23:17:28 UTC 2007


Brian McNeil wrote:
> Florence Devouard wrote:
>   
>> * the tax deduction is only available in the USA. Not anywhere else.
>>     
> I put my donation last year through my accountants as tax deductible, and
> I'm in Belgium. What happened?
It's not unusual for accountants to take only a superficial look at the 
material that is provided to them.  For them to do examine everything in 
detail would make their services more expensive.  Even taxing 
authorities are limited in how much they can examine things because of 
the volume of work that they must process.  These sort of things can be 
reviewed in the course of an audit.  This may be nothing more than an 
office audit that you never know about.  When they do that they need to 
consider whether pursuing the irregularity will be worth while.  If 
collecting the extra tax has a greater administrative cost than the 
amount of the tax itself it's just as well to let it go.

People can get away with far more than they believe they can get away 
with. :-)

Ec



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