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Re: Running a Tor Server as a Tax Deduction?



On Jul 8, 2009, at 1:44 AM, Ringo wrote:

Hey,

I was thinking about how to get more companies/organizations to run Tor servers and then it hit me that maybe the expenses associated with doing so could be taken as a tax exemption. It's hard to convince a company to
run a Tor server, but if it's in their financial interest, you might
have a little more leveragee.

Do people think that running a Tor server could be seen as a donation to the Tor Project (which is a 501(c)(3) charity IIRC)? Or is this kind of
like deducting mojitos as "business drinks"? Obviously I'm not looking
for advice from a CPA/accountant (although that would be great), just
wondering based on people's personal knowledge of tax law. If people
think it's worth looking into (or maybe possible), I'd be happy to hire
a CPA/tax expert and talk with them about it. I just thought I'd ask
here before throwing my money away ; )

Ringo

I asked about three and a half years ago and got this response:

On Jan 30, 2006, at 7:15 PM, Roger Dingledine wrote:

On Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 07:07:58PM -0500, Brian Puccio wrote:
I know you aren't CPAs, but I was wondering if the following question
was ever posed: can one consider running a tor server (a few hundred GB
a month, maybe as much as a TB) a donation for purposes of tax
deductions? I know it's a stretch, but I was just wondering. Thanks for
your time!

I'm not a CPA, but as I understand it, you need to give actual
valuables to a 501c3, and they need to register them, include
them in their books, and so on.

In any case, Tor is not one of those.

The best I could imagine is to call your bandwidth use a business expense
in your schedule C, if that makes sense for your business.

--Roger