[gentoo-nfp] Re: RFC: OSUOSL Fundraiser

[Alec Warner]

https://budgeting.thenest.com/pay-income-taxes-money-received-fundraiser-34381.html
seems to imply that if we have a separate account for fundraising we might
be in a good position to avoid paying taxes on fundraising proceeds. But we
should still follow up with the CPA on this to see what else we should do
for this.

-A

On Sat, Aug 29, 2020 at 12:58 PM Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> In our last meeting (the AGM) we briefly discussed giving to the OSL, who
> graciously host much of the equipment for Gentoo Foundation Inc at no cost
> to us (including space, bandwidth, cooling, and power[0].) We have not
> given the OSL money in a few years.
>
>  - $50.00 in 2009
>  - $6,000 in 2013
>  - Possibly a $2,000 payment in 2017; the board approved this payment but
> it's unclear we made it (I sent mail separately to follow up on this.)
>
> The OSL is itself a tax-exempt 501c3 tax-exempt organization. Currently we
> are not, so it seems more efficient to just raise money directly to the
> OSL. I see 3 options here:
>
> (1) Create a fundraiser page that talks about why we need to raise money
> for the OSL and the donate link goes to the OSL donation page.
> (2) Create a fundraiser page that talks about why we need to raise money
> for the OSL, and the donate link goes to a paypal account that is
> specifically for this fundraiser and is time limited (is not our normal
> paypal account.)
> (3) Create a fundraiser page that talks about why we need to raise money
> for the OSL, and the donate link goes to our normal paypal account.
>
> I think (1) is probably 'best' but their donation system seems to only
> take credit cards and I suspect many of our users are more familiar with
> paypal. The difference between (2) and (3) is mostly a question for the CPA
> as to whether, if we do 2 we can avoid paying taxes on these funds (which
> we are basically raising on behalf of a tax-exempt organization.) If there
> is no clear tax advantage for (2) then we should do (1) or (3).
>
> Thoughts?
>
> -A
>
> [0] In 2017 Robin wrote:
> "Gentoo has at OSL:
> * a full-height 42U rack, with 2x 15A 120V power circuits.
> ** 10U is production infra (including VM hosting), full-depth.
> ** 10U of this is dedicated releng systems, full-depth.
> ** 13U presently unused.
> ** 9U (half-depth) is network/power
> ** 5U+ of half-depth releng systems (shared w/ network-power)
> * Access to PowerPC POWER8 releng VMs."
>