I was interested if there were any thoughts from users on claiming a portion of your hours crunching numbers for Rosetta as volunteer hours or as a tax-deductable donation to an NPO? Any creative CPA's on this board that want to chime in? My thought is that I paid for the computer, I pay the hydro bill, and I pay for the bandwidth. It's gotta be close to $200 of donation a year to an NPO. If questioned by the IRS, we all have handy dandy logs in the BOINC Manager showing our usage time.

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The answer seems to be NO according to a discussion some time ago
over at Einstein.....

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/forum_thread.php?id=4528

I beleive there is a very subtile distinction between "Not for profit" and "Non-profit" organizations. The first is simply one that does not seek to make a profit. I belong to a local club that estblished itself that way, our goal is just to break-even, and run the club another year. But we handle fairly large amounts of money in running trips and events, the money goes in one end and out the other. Due to the money, we incorporated the club as a not for profit entity.

But the second ("non-profit")is a charity. Rosetta@home is not a formal charity. And therefore there aren't any deductions for your time, mileage, electric bill etc.

The related question would be "Is there a way to START a non-profit organization that we could support, that would make some of our work here tax deductable?". For example, "Help us support after school programs where kids learn about computers, science, biology and run Rosetta".

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

In British charity law the donation would need to be in money to have any realistic chance.

Rosetta would probably count as a charity in UK law if we regarded bakerlab as part of UW, as an educational charity.

One way to get power bills etc would be to set up a trust that re-imbursed people's bills. You'd donate cash to that trust and apply for your bills while supporting Rosetta to be re-imbursed.

It all has to be at arms length (so there is no guarantee your donation comes back to you - it might go to someone else's power bill) so it is probably a non starter in practice. HMRC are wary of any scheme that ends up with the donors claiming all the cash back.

What would make real sense under UK law would be a charity to enable poor people to crunch Rosetta, paying their power bills with donations from rich supporters.

~~ LLB

What would make real sense under UK law would be a charity to enable poor people to crunch Rosetta, paying their power bills with donations from rich supporters.

~~ LLB

They already do, it's called Taxes and Dole :-D

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Team mauisun.org