On Sat, 02 Apr 2005 10:30:20 -0800, Alice wrote: >I'm not the expert, but I'll tell what I know. One tax-exempt status is >Nonprofit. I think the organization has to declare a catagory, and the >catagory that groups like IOLI and my sewing group qualify for has an >education element and/or a public service element to it. In order to show >that we do volunteer time towards these goals, we have to keep track of how >many hours we spend each year doing it. > >Each member has to report these hours so the collective amount for each >local group can be reported to the head officers. The total for the >organization goes on some report yearly to the tax office. > >This is a USA Federal Tax Status situation. I don't know if there is a >similar situation in other countries.
The UK situation has both similarities and differences. The tax-exempt status for charities, for certain types of income, has categories of which educational is one. Education has to be aimed at the public at large, not just members of the organisation. So far, fairly similar. The details of the way the exemption is achieved and maintained are different. The UK Inland Revenue evaluates the status of an organisation once when the organisation applies for the charitable status from The Charities Commission, a separate government body. The evaluation is of what the rules of the organisation set out as its aims and whether the aims are considered charitable. The evaluation is of what the organisation intends to do in the future, without any regard to the past activities. Once the charitable status has been achieved, the Inland Revenue do very low key monitoring of what the charity does. Provided accounts are filed on time, the financial details appear consistent with the stated aims and there isn't an unrelated business being carried on (selling books about lace is charitable, selling second-hand books in general would not be) then the Inland Revenue will not enquire further into activities and certainly don't expect any report of what was actually done, never mind volunteer hours. Instead the part of the Inland Revenue that deals with charities concentrates its efforts on looking at border line cases; they spend a lot of time on a very small number of organisations and leave the straightforward ones in peace. Steph (Accountant and qualified tax professional, who did this stuff for a living for 15 years) Scanned by WinProxy http://www.Ositis.com/ To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
