[NHCOLL-L:5457] RE: Tax receipt evaluation premium for good collection data

[Doug Yanega]

Rich White wrote:

>In the US, the value which can be claimed for trophy animal mounts 
>is what is called "the taxpayer's basis".  That is defined now as 
>what the donor paid to have the taxidermy done.  It does not include 
>the cost of the hunt, or any adjustments for the size of the trophy 
>(record book ranking) of the "scientific value" of the specimen.  In 
>the past, before August 2006, those considerations were used to 
>determine the value for tax purposes.
>
>Also, in the US, the receiving institution cannot be involved in 
>establishing the value of the donation.  That is a matter strictly 
>between the donor and the IRS.  The donor, if he or she does not 
>know the cost of the taxidermy work, can rely on an appraiser, or 
>simply a taxidermist, to establish what the average cost of mounting 
>a given animal would have been at the time the work was done.  The 
>receiving institution cannot even suggest someone to do that 
>appraisal.

If the total claimed evaluation is below US$5000, the IRS *will* 
accept an appraised value supplied by the donor, but ONLY if the 
appraisal is demonstrably following "Fair Market Value" - some 
external source that can be used as a reference point. For donations 
valued at $5000 or more, there MUST be an external appraisal.

For self-appraisal, in the case of something like a stamp collection 
or coin collection or comic book collection, there are plenty of 
pricing catalogs, and these can be fairly trivial to deal with. For 
scientific specimens, in general, there are almost no pricing 
catalogs (with a few exceptions such as butterflies and some other 
"collectible" insects), which makes it much harder to establish FMV. 
Moreover, FMV for specimens - even when pricing catalogs are 
available - virtually never takes "scientific value" into account; a 
rare butterfly costs the same regardless of whether it has good data 
or not.

Since I'm an entomologist, I'm intimately familiar with the procedure 
for taking a tax deduction - for the thousands of specimens I donate 
every year - and for miscellaneous insects such as bees and wasps and 
flies, etc., there are almost no external sources for pricing. Up 
until a few years ago, a company called "Insects International" sold 
specimens of miscellaneous insects (from roaches to click beetles to 
crane flies to fig wasps), and the minimum price in their catalog for 
ANY insect was US$2.00; that company went out of business, and their 
stock was bought up by BioQuip, and the most recent BioQuip catalog 
sells miscellaneous insects for a minimum price of US$3.00 each. 
Therefore, the FMV for an unidentified insect specimen is $3.00, and 
that does not depend on rarity, condition, or quality of data. So, 
for any number of miscellaneous insects up to 1666, one can stay 
under the $5000 cap, and self-appraise the donation using the 
*minimum* pricing, citing the BioQuip catalog as the pricing guide. 
If one has specimens of things like butterflies, of course, the 
prices are generally much higher, and involve other criteria.

Peace,
-- 

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314        skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82