[Openicc] GSoC mentors payments usage

[Hal V. Engel]

On Wednesday 03 September 2008 10:35:53 pm Kai-Uwe Behrmann wrote:
> Hello,
>
> as it was pointed out the last years salary was not used for anything
> because of formality burden. My guess is the situation did not change.

The issue is that the mentor orginization has to receive the funds from Google 
and then distribute them to the mentors if it is going to the mentors.  If one 
or more of the mentors is in the USA (this was true last year and this year) 
then there are significant tax implications that the orginization or it's 
representitive have to deal with such as tax withholding, creating W2 forms. 
SSI payments (this includes matching), state tax issues and so on.  Not only 
is there a considerable amount of paper work involved in this but also 
significant potenial liabilities (if you don't get the paper work just right 
the IRS will fine you).  In addition, last year like this year one of the 
mentors was not in the USA and there are likely additional tax related 
implications to this although I did not look into it.   None of this has 
changed in any significant way.  I would imagine that many of the same issues 
would apply even if US tax laws were not an issue (IE. no mentor in the USA).

>
> Costs we could be:
> * hardware, like measurement devices, electronic, targets ...
> * running costs, like internet server and domain fees
> * ICC membership fees, e.g. I rejected my WG membership because of the fee
> * there is always something ...
> * or simply for paying the mentors (mine can go to something of the above)
>
> In order to not let pass the payments, I could imagine several options.
> How this could happen:
> * directly sent the transfere to a person of trust and use the difference
>   of income minus tax and other stuff for possible expenses
>   simple but not very transparent
> * give to a trusted organisation and call the money from there if needed
> * transfere to a organisation of joice just to let the money not run away
>   (KDE, Qt/Nokia ;-) Gnome, fd.o?, FSF ...); works always
> * start a own tax free organisation :-(
>
>
> Hope we are not too late at all.

No we are not too late at this point.  But we need to figure something out in 
the next few weeks if we are going to do this.   

The Google rules say that the mentor orginization can use the funds for any 
purpose including making payments to the mentors but also for anything that 
the orginization decides to use it for.  If the funds went to some tax exempt 
or charitable orginization then this would mitigate most of the tax 
implications.  One way to handle this would be for whoever handles this for us 
to get the payment and then domate it to a qualified tax deductable 
orginization which would then allow that person to write off the full amount 
and avoid any tax liabilities while claimming the whole amount as income.  
This would avoid all of the paper work and liabilities related to distributing 
the funds to the mentors. As Kai-Uwe points out this would not be very 
transpartent.

Another possibility would be to have the funds sent to freedesktop.org since 
OpenICC is an off shoot of that orginization.  I suspect that if we talked to 
someone with some pull in freedesktop.org that they would be willing to hold 
the funds for us so that we could later use them.   

I think it would be a good idea for us to have representation on the ICC but 
having looked into this they want $2500/year from each orginization that is a 
member and the $1000 we could get from Google does not even come close to the 
amount needed for a single year and we can't count on it going forward.  The 
ICC does have a provision for free memberships for hardship cases but as Kai-
Uwe points out they rejected his request for membership under this program and 
I don't know of anyone who has "qualified".  Anyone accepted under the 
hardship program would not be a voting member although they would be able to 
have some input.

Hal

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