Ask the Center

The foundation may not pay rent to the family office, because the family office is considered a disqualified person, and that’s not a personal service. However, a foundation and a family office can share office space, provided that the person to whom the foundation is paying rent, i.e., the landlord, is not a disqualified person. So, if it’s a third-party… Read More

There are at least two options. First, it’s always wise to return a gift or benefit of this kind if you don’t want to use it. This is true for all sorts of tickets, benefits, and other awards and gifts. It’s also always permissible to use those things in furtherance of charitable purposes. My favorite example is tickets to an NFL… Read More

There are no problems with a foundation setting up a donor-advised fund. When the Pension Protection Act was drafted back in 2006, one of the things they considered explicitly was prohibiting distributions from donor-advised funds to private foundations, because of the way you can arbitrage the tax rules. They left that out, because they considered it to already be illegal… Read More

Well, this one’s easy, but not for the reason that you think. You should stop that process all together. The IRS has ruled that you can’t split payments that way. If there’s a deductible portion and non-deductible, this process, known as “bifurcation” is not permissible. The IRS has said you can’t write the charitable portion out of the foundation and… Read More

In addition to paying the tax on investment income, which is either 2 percent or 1 percent, foundations have to pay quarterly estimated tax payments. Typically, they anticipate what those payments are. If you’ve underpaid it, you need to rectify it, and how you do so really depends on how much you’ve underpaid by. If you’re grossly and intentionally underpaying… Read More