Newman: Contributions to College Athletic Booster Clubs
Not all transfers of value to qualified charitable organizations are deductible. When you buy a book from the college bookstore, your payment is not a contribution; you got what you paid for. If you give $300 to your local public radio station, and they give you a tote bag, you’ve made a charitable contribution, but you have to subtract the value of the tote bag from your deductible amount.
What if you make a substantial payment — say $2,000 — to a major college’s athletic booster club, knowing that, by virtue of that payment, you gain the right to purchase otherwise unavailable tickets to that school’s football games? Surely, the entire $2,000 should not be deductible. The deduction should be $2,000 minus the fair market value of the rights obtained. Congress says that the deduction should be 80 percent of the contributed amount, or $1,600, no matter which booster club it is. Is that fair? This essay will describe how we got to that 80 percent, and what we might do about it. Specifically, the essay describes how the secondary ticket market brokers, such as StubHub and Ticketmaster, could be used to value the rights obtained.
Lloyd Mayer