[Noisebridge-board] donation receipt

[Rachel McConnell]

Hi guys,

I just heard from the person with the PIR motion sensor boards.  He is
interested in donating them to Noisebridge, along with a scanner and, I
believe, an oscilloscope and logic analyzer.  (I turned down a printer.)
   He's going to come to Noisebridge Monday night around 9 with all of
these things and possibly other things.

I've just been doing a bit of research on our responsibilities as a
future 501-c-3 organization.  Based primarily on the information in this
pamphlet[1], I believe we are not actually required to provide a receipt
or valuation of donations to any donor if we do not provide any goods or
services in exchange (if we did that, we'd need to provide
acknowledgment for donations valued over $250).  The donor may not take
the deduction, however, without such an acknowledgment.

I think we should:

1. keep a record of all donations
2. provide a receipt with our 501-c-3 number, when we get it, as a
service to our donors

These could be combined by simply keeping a copy of the receipt.

See the attached form which looks to me be suitable. I haven't got a
good sense of whether the form should need to be signed by a board
member; that isn't specifically mentioned in the IRS pamphlet but the
context they have is closer to a yearly statement which seems more
onerous for us than providing a receipt at the time of the donation.
I'd worry that if we don't require a board member signature that people
(not NB people of course!) could more easily forge a form like this and
we could get accused of fraud.

Thoughts?

Rachel

[1] http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1771.pdf
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: DonationReceipt.rtf
Type: application/rtf
Size: 1413 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/board/attachments/20090301/87b2ba37/attachment.rtf>