“For nearly a year, the Environmental Defense Fund has gone all out alerting donors about the opportunity to make tax-free charitable donations straight from their individual retirement accounts,” writes Debra Blum in Wednesday’s (9/4) Chronicle of Philanthropy (subscription required). “In the first eight months of the current fiscal year, the organization had already seen the number of such gifts grow by more than fourfold over all of last fiscal year…. Even as more and more donors are making gifts from their IRAs, officially called qualified charitable distributions, or QCDs, most nonprofits could be doing much more to solicit and handle them…. QCDs, which allow donors who are at least 70.5 years old to give money directly from their IRAs to charities without it counting as taxable income, were first allowed by law in 2006 … but it wasn’t until last year the popularity of QCDs appeared to start picking up…. Recent changes in federal tax law … doubled the standard deduction [and] resulted in an estimated 21 million fewer taxpayers who itemized. Without access to deductions for itemized donations, more and more folks were noticing the benefits of tax-free QCDs.” The article discusses what donors and fundraisers should know about making gifts from IRAs.
Posted September 10, 2019
