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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

A slight tangent, but I'm curious, can Google claim the donation is from Google for tax purposes even though it's under the instruction of Nils instead of him receiving cash? If so, is that why they offer to double it?

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Taxes had nothing to do with it. Early on, one of the Chrome VRP reporters asked that we donate his bounty to the International Red Cross. We all felt his generosity deserved some extra recognition, so we decided to top off the reward, and do the same in the future for approved charities. We also decided that unclaimed rewards would be paid to the International Red Cross.

That's pretty much the whole story. It was a quick email thread between a few people in Chrome Security and Google Security.

If Nils wanted to claim it as a deduction, first he would have to claim it as income and pay gift tax.

Not worth it for him.

Google could deduct it either way - either as a donation or as a business expense.

The rules for paying tax are different for corporations (which incidentally is one of the reasons some self employed programmers incorporate).

Google makes the donation, so yes they get the tax benefits. However, as it still means twice as much money going to charity I don't know why anyone would have a problem with that.

There's some cultural ... thing ... that makes it seem bad to donate to charity if you have some other motive, like ego or a tax deduction. I don't really understand why, but a lot of people feel that way.

xkcd's take: http://xkcd.com/871/

It suppose it takes time and maturity to realize that people have multiple competing goals, and are not perfectly selfless.

Yes, that's true. Google made the donation and I chose the donee.

Google can take a deduction for the full amount, whether it's a charitable donation (in which case they can deduct it as a charitable donation) or a payment (in which case it reduces the profit of the enterprise, on which tax is calculated).

Can someone clarify the whole charity tax deduction thing? Unless tax is at >100% (or 50%?), surely there's no gain from doubling donations to benefit from tax deduction? Or am I not understanding something here?

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