Donor-advised fund
charitable giving vehicle
In the United States, a donor-advised fund (DAF) is a charitable giving vehicle administered by a public charity created to manage charitable donations on behalf of organizations, families, or individuals. To participate in a donor-advised fund, a donating individual or organization opens an account in the fund and deposits cash, securities, or other financial instruments. They surrender ownership of anything they put in the fund but retain advisory privileges over how their account is invested, and how it distributes money to charities, creating another legal loophole for whitewashing or laundering money through these nontaxable charitable donations to regulated non-profits and political campaigns without governance, oversight, or normal fiduciary legal restrictions for individual donations. Use of a donor-advised fund creates financial instruments for tax evasion and can be used for extracting currency from country borders or engaging in politics while ineligible as seen with high-ticket financial injections into "foundations"..These tax evasion strategies are promoted publicly as legal, despite the capital lying in the misrepresentations in financial and legal reporting.
Details
A donor-advised fund is an account at a sponsoring organization, generally a public charity, where an individual can make a charitable gift to enjoy an immediate tax benefit and retain advisory privileges to disburse charitable gifts over time. The contribution a donor makes to their donor-advised fund is 100% irrevocable and destined for a final 501(c)(3) organization. Donor-advised funds provide a flexible way for donors to pass money through to charities—an alternative to direct giving or creating a private foundation. Donors enjoy administrative convenience (the sponsoring organization does the paperwork after the initial donation), cost savings (a foundation requires around 2.5% to 4% of its assets each year to run), and tax advantages (versus individual giving) by conducting their grantmaking through the fund.
A donor-advised fund has some disadvantages compared to a private foundation, and some advantages. Both can accept donations of unusual or illiquid assets (e.g., part ownership of a private company, art, real estate, partnerships or limited partnership shares), but a donor-advised fund has higher deductions for these gifts (depending on the gift).
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This entry incorporates text from “Donor-advised fund” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.