Moving Forward
Initially, one of the issues that arose about the Community Giving program related to whether or not Mozilla Corporation could legally give in-kind support to volunteers who would then might use the donation to work on matters related directly to Mozilla and its software. Although we suspected we were OK, we thought it would be good to check if there were any conflicts of interest.
Today, we had a call with Mozilla’s lawyers who helped us think about this issue. They advised us that this program likely aligns with our corporate mission and would probably not result in any conflicts of interest. In many corporate giving programs, donations of money or in-kind support may raise some issues because that support might be used by the recipient to benefit the business entity that gave the donation. However, because Mozilla’s mission is so unique, what we will do with this program advances our mission, which has always related directly to the community. The lawyers advised us that we should not consider this a charity program, it is a business expense. Therefore, it should *not* be treated as a charitable expense. We are working with Mozilla’s CFO to set up the accounting procedures for the program. I am glad we resolved this issue because in my prior grant-making experiences, properly documenting how support is given was a big issue and potential liability…believe it or not.
The second issue that came up during our call was how to move forward if our support somehow placed a tax burden on the volunteer recipients. (One example, for instance, if we gave a grant to someone, what possible financial burdens to the recipients would there be?) We decided to create a list of the things that Mozilla Corporation might provide to its volunteers and send it to the lawyers for their review. They can help us think about how to document everything so our volunteers are faced with little to no burden related to income or reporting. Although it is something the Giving program should not worry too much about right now, the lawyers did say that everything we do will have some tax consequence and we should think about it.
