(04-27-2018 08:50 AM)3xTribe Wrote: I was disappointed to learn that, as a result of changes to tax laws, seat licenses will now be a separate donation from regular Tribe Club donations. Understanding that this is a very minor difference to many donors, the result is that a $250 per seat license will be required for my basketball seats, over an above the donation I make to Tribe Club. I could certainly reduce my Tribe Club giving by that amount, but I'll lose the very nice parking spot I've had. Yes, this is a minor, even trivial concern, especially for those who donate far more than I do, but I wish there had been another way to get to compliance with the non-deductibility of ticket related donations.
I, for one, do not find your concerns to be trivial at all. I fully understand the need, from a record keeping standpoint, for the College to now treat a mandatory contribution required to purchase a season ticket as a separate contribution, a license fee so to speak, because the new tax law does not allow you to deduct that portion of your contribution on your tax return. The College, therefore, needs to separate the contributions into two buckets so that you only get credit for a tax deductible contribution for any contributions not related to the required license. What concerns me, however, is that I feel that the College is taking advantage of this change in tax law as a way to indirectly squeeze donors into upping their annual contributions.
I am certainly no expert on fund accounting for governmental entities, and it has been decades since I used my license to actually work in a CPA firm, but something just does not seem right about how the College will apparently choose to recognize the various transactions resulting from these changes when looking at us as donors.
I actually called the Tribe Club this morning looking for clarification and answers to specific questions. I got the impression that the questions that I was asking had either not yet been fully addressed by the Tribe Club, or the questions result in uncomfortable answers which the Tribe Club has not been very transparent in addressing with Tribe Club donors. As best as I can understand, I get the impression that the license fee revenues will now filter into Tribe Athletics the same way that ticket sale revenue is accounted for. The W&M student athlete is going to get the same benefit from dollars that I spend on this fee that they would if I gave the money directly to the Tribe Club. But instead of my giving the money to the Tribe Club, and the Tribe Club using it to help fund Tribe Athletics, it bypasses the Tribe Club altogether and goes directly, as I understand it, to Tribe Athletics. If, as 3XTribe suggests, I simply carve up my annual contribution into 2 parts, I will still be supporting Tribe Athletics the same way that I have in the past, but the Tribe Club will not be getting as much credit for this contribution and my standing as a Tribe Club contributor will go down.
in all fairness, I was pounding the individual on the other end of the phone with questions that he/she had either not yet considered or was uncomfortable answering, but the answer that I got was that the folks in the Tribe Club were hopeful that donors such as me would continue to make the same Tribe Club related contributions that we have in the past so that the student athletes would not suffer as a result of the tax law change.
Let's be clear here. The W&M student athlete is only negatively impacted by the new tax law if I decide that the total amount that I am willing to pay for a seat license plus a Tribe Club donation is less than it was before because I am unwilling to make a payment on which I do not get a tax deduction. But as long as I am contributing the same amount of money, even if part of it is for a license that I cannot deduct, the student athlete has not been impacted one iota by the mix of my disbursements, but I am now less of a donor in the eyes of the Tribe Club.
What little bit that I could find on the Tribe Club website about this issue was something that Bobby Dwyer put out there in late 2017 encouraging donors to consider making their full 2017-18 Tribe Club contribution prior to 12/31/17 so that you got one more year of tax deductibility on the portion related to season ticket requirements, prior to the 2018 tax law change. Very good tax advice indeed. Just because the College has to account for the "license" portion of my disbursement separately does not mean that they cannot continue to give me credit for my overall disbursements to Tribe Athletics.
I have no problem forcing me to make a contribution to Tribe Athletics in order to have a right to purchase a season ticket. Never have. Forcing me to make that contribution, however, and not giving me credit as a contributor, is quite a different matter, and has absolutely nothing to do with the intended impact of the new tax law.