Big-game hunting bags big tax breaks

Trophy donations raise questions in Congress
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7385621/

Valuable catch
Often appraised for many times their market value, the trophies can yield hefty income tax deductions if nonprofit organizations agree to accept them as charitable gifts. And the Wyobraska museum and others have been more than willing.

According to critics in Congress, top officials at natural history museums and animal rights advocates, this form of charitable giving allows wealthy hunters to go on big-game expeditions essentially at taxpayers' expense — an arrangement so blatant that one animal trophy appraiser advertises his services under the headline: "Hunt for Free." The taxpayer subsidies also encourage hunters to track down and shoot the largest, fittest and rarest of the world's animals, the critics say.

Nobody knows how many trophy mounts are donated yearly to nonprofit collections, or how much tax revenue is being lost to the charitable deductions. But at the Wyobraska museum, the floodgates are open wide.

Records show that in 2000, Wyobraska took in mounts worth $1.4 million. In 2004, the museum's curator said, the value of donations grew to more than $5 million, even though display rooms and storage containers were already overflowing. The entire stuffed menagerie of 800 animals in the rail car out back arrived just last year.

:puke:

and raise you one.

asshats told me all the animals they shot 'over there'/

dachshunds all over your home!

:P (just kiddin)

But pity the congressman that proposes to eliminate them.

It's bad enough we have the thugs in green killing "those brown people," but we also have to encourage them to kill animals? Every single damn day I visit here I get more upset at the idiots that rule this country.

and you start wondering when some enterprising Republican isn't going to come up with big game hunts for illegal aliens. I can just see the advertisements.

http://www.forbes.com/personalfinance/philanthropy/2005/04/06/cz_jn_0406beltway.html

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Just four years ago, U.S. charities were celebrating the prospect of new tax incentives for donors. As part of his "compassionate conservative" agenda, President George W. Bush proposed giving the two-thirds of tax filers who don't itemize a special deduction for charitable contributions. Congress seemed on board too.

It turned out, however, that the White House and Congress had higher priorities when they doled out trillions in tax cuts. And now, amid growing worry about both the federal deficit and charitable abuses, charities are playing defense. In its 2006 budget proposal released in February, the Bush Administration called for $1.4 trillion in tax cuts over ten years, yet didn't even bother to include the deduction for non-itemizers.

The charitable sector's problems were demonstrated this week at a Senate Finance committee hearing on charitable reforms. Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Mark W. Everson warned that a less compliant environment, combined with inadequate IRS enforcement, had allowed pockets of abuse to develop among the 1.8 million U.S. not-for-profits.

<snip>

The real money, however, would come from restricting deductions for non-cash donations, an area where claimed values are hard to police and exaggerations are common. Grassley, a folksy farmer fond of theatrics, opened the hearing flanked by the mounted head of a South African springbok-- an allusion to news reports of how big game hunters have written off their safaris by donating their trophies to compliant museums. "This type of scam gives new meaning to the term tax 'game','' Grassley quipped.

...more...

:puke: on the killing for tax write-off scammers