Hi Pete,
and welcome to KivaFriends!
This has been occasionally discussed here, and that's Kiva's latest response, I believe (from
http://www.kivafriends.org/index.php/topic,3276.msg55253.html#msg55253):
[3] Tax-advantaged status in countries other than the USA.
Premal mentioned on the February Conference Call that there was a set of countries where Kiva would be looking into tax-advantaged status for donations made by lenders. Could you confirm that Kiva is looking into this, and provide us with a list of which countries might be on the list of possibilities? Canadians in particular are quite eager to know whether they might be able to treat their Kiva contributions as tax-deductible, and the sense is that this may raise Kiva's donations totals noticeably.
DISCUSSION:
Kiva is not actively deploying resources on this right now, because they don't have a complete sense of the amount of resources required to go after it, so it's a matter of priorities. They do, however, talk about the issue often. Liz has brought it to Premal's attention again, to keep it a fresh issue. When they are able to work on it, they'll assign priorities based on the size of the lender base in a country; Canada will be first on the list. Liz wondered whether there might be an EU-wide policy that would apply, or if each country's rules would be different, does anyone know?
I noted that we have concerned and eager-for-an-answer people all over the world here, and asked if it would be helpful to solicit KF volunteers to find out the details of what applying for tax-advantaged status would take in each of their own countries to enable a sizing, and perhaps even offer some volunteer assistance in getting it underway. She will query Premal and staff and let me know if that would be helpful; I assured her that the interest here was high on this issue and that success in this area would almost surely result in higher donations.
Best wishes,
Wolfgang.
