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Comment by Tanoc | Hacker News Reader

There is something to being wary of rounding up. For example when you get food from a drive-through or buy groceries and they ask you to round up to the nearest dollar, with the rest of the exchange going towards a charitable cause. They do that because at scale it's enough for them to get a tax incentive for charitable donations via other people's action. I refuse to help an international corporation cheese tax law.

But for something like me handing the shawarma guy a tenner for an exchange that comes out to $9.39, it's not anything to even care about. It's a rounding error.

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> They do that because at scale it's enough for them to get a tax incentive for charitable donations via other people's action. I refuse to help an international corporation cheese tax law.

This is a myth. They can’t claim this on taxes because they don’t have the associated income. To get that using your money, they’d have to claim your donation as income and pay taxes on it, making moot any tax savings (and committing fraud against you to boot).

What they do use your money for is marketing. All the money goes to the charity but they get to say things like “Our program raised a gazillion dollars for those in need.” Which has the effect of positive associations of a giving company which hasn’t actually given.

That's not how tax law works in the US. See https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-gets-tax-benefit-thos...

The corp is acting as a collection agent on behalf of the charity, they don't get to deduct it as a charitable donation. Even if they did, they would have to then count the money as income, which would offset any tax deduction they would get, giving the corp 0 net tax benefit.

...Though they may get some publicity benefit from it, which is why I don't go out of my way to donate using corps as a proxy. If its a small amount that I may not otherwise make, for a good cause, sure. But for my more deliberate giving, I would avoid corp proxies. So I don't give through my employer (unless they are offering to match it with their own funds).

In countries with cash rounding (Denmark, Sweden, Australia, etc) there are strict rules on how that rounding works.

9.39kr will be rounded here to 9.50kr if I pay cash. 9.24kr would be rounded to 9.00kr.

If I pay electronically it's 9.39kr.

I assume your "kr" example is the Danish kroner here? If yes, for others, the current FX rates is 6.79 DKK to USD. So 0.25 DKK is about 0.0368 USD, or less than 5 cents in US.

It's the Danish crown as I live here, so yes, you lose or gain up to 3½¢.

In Sweden they round to the nearest whole crown, so you gain or lose up to 4.8¢.

When the US half-cent coin was withdrawn, it had purchasing power equivalent to 16¢ today.

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