>>2856907>>2856906>I don't get how giving your money away saves money - I mean you dont pay taxes cuz you don't keep it, there must be more to this scam than I know ofAlso crucial to utilizing charity as a tax avoidance strategy is pumping up the value of your generosity. “You donate some fancy piece of fine art to a museum, you get an assessment for the art, it’s much more than you could actually ever sell it for,” explains Reck. “You get a big tax write-off.” It’s not just fine art, either — one popular form of overvaluation (until Congress passed a bill putting an end to it last year) involved inflating the value of land. Called a “syndicated conservation easement,” it took advantage of an incentive for environmental conservation, in which landowners who agree not to develop their land would get a tax break proportional to the fair market value of the land. “The game is that people just massively, ludicrously inflate these fair market values,” says Reck. In the syndicated version of this tax break, a group of investors buys land, gets an overvalued assessment on it, and shares the tax write-off between themselves. “Now there are a bunch of court cases about it,” Reck says.
