I have recently learned about the practice of donating Internet domain names to charity as a tax write-off. Apparently you can have your domain name appraised and receive a tax write-off for that value when you donate the domain. The problem I see with this is that the domain name appraisal process seems to vary widely depending on what appraisal methods are used. Does the government have some standards in place for appraising domain value? I’m not sure…but even if they do it seems easy to inflate the value of a domain just to increase the write-off. (getting “fake” traffic, buying tons if inbound links, spamming search engines, etc..) Inflating the value of online/virtual real estate is a lot easier than offline “real” real estate. I am no domain expert…so if you are I would love to hear from you!
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1 response so far ↓
1 Andrew // Jan 28, 2007 at 5:26 pm
You can’t really do this. Some people will, but if they get audited they’ll owe a lot of money. Here’s a complete analysis:
http://domainnamewire.com/2006/12/14/donating-domains-to-charity-isnt-an-instant-tax-break/
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