As far as your tax id number, you can pretty easily go online and look up anyone's id number so I don't think it is important to be secretive about it. I didn't have our IRS form handy when I was sitting down to send out donation request so I just went online and looked it up.
We recently decided to serve dinner at our next meeting in order to attract more members/more parent involvement. The officers decided we did not have enough $ in our budget for this. Someone has now offered to donate the $ for us to provide food. Now I am told I am not allowed to solicit donations without the Principal's authorization!? Has anyone ever heard of this? They want to know who is donating and I said the person(s) choose to remain anonymous. Is this okay too?
JayVee, I'd say if you were writing the letter for a donation, then putting the EIN on the letter is fine. Many places we ask for donations want the number. But, if you include a copy of your letter from the IRS, then a number on the letterhead would not be needed anyhoo.
Publication 526 - Charitable Contributions - has everything you need to know about claiming a deduction. Non-cash contributions do require a letter from the charitable organization to be tax deductible. For cash contributions of $250 or less, the donor can use a cancelled check instead of a letter. Only decductions to qualified organizations are deductible (Qualified organizations are listed in Publication 78) As I understand it, schools are qualified organizations, but PTO's are not unless they are 501(c)3 organizations. Certainly any PTO can solicit donations and send a thank you letter - just don't say the donation is tax deductible if it is not.
As for putting the tax ID # on a letter, I consider our tax ID to be confidential and would never put it in a letter. Am I missing something here?
Go to the IRS website and click on charities. There's publications and other info. you may be interested in. It wouldn't hurt for someone else on board to educate themselves about IRS rules and regs. Seems your pres is just a "little" misinformed!
