Folding Forum

Hey folks,

This Folding@Home project is one of the coolest projects I've ever had the pleasure of using my computer for. I generate about 4.5M points per day, so I'm very excited to be contributing to this amazing team.

Since I am volunteering hours of service, electricity, CPU and GPU power, etc, are there any tax write-off opportunities available? I would think this would be classified as either donation or volunteering, but I'm not quite sure.

I was hoping someone who contributes to Folding@Home had any experience with this. I will be doing the project either way, but I wanted to see if there were any other benefits.

Thank you!!

If you send them money, I am sure it is deductible. (These days most folks can only take the standard deduction, but you can itemize if household deductions exceed $24,000)
I would not be prepared to prove to an IRS auditor how much my electric bill changed due to F@H.

If you donate money to Folding@Home via Washington University, it is tax deductible.

Like Jimbo, I would not want to have to go into an IRS audit & try to back up a deduction for electricity or hardware costs.

Ive always read that donating money is a tax right off but participating by running the software is not.

The way to address this would be to ask the university users to put a Fair Market Value on the compute power delivered. They already have a point system in place that properly values both the GFLOPs and the speed with which the results are returned.

Now all they need is for some university economist/accountant to make a good faith estimate of what those points are worth in $ and write a statement to that effect that we could download.

It would be well worth their time. The invisible hand of Adam Smith would promptly push a great many idle computers out of the woodwork and into service!

Considering that many of us are doing this to help find a cure for COVID, I doubt the IRS would be too picky about the deduction, as long as people aren't trying to claim work done on computers they don't own and didn't pay to run.