By Bob Meyer

Are you involved in amateur sports in your community, now that it’s Little League time again? You probably spend some time and money on the activity. Is there a way to get any tax benefit for your expenses? It depends.

If you, for example, sponsored and coached a girl’s amateur softball team. The league to which your team belonged may be qualified as a charitable organization.

However, if you personally paid for the league entry fee, equipment, uniforms, and travel expenses, most of your expenses will not be deductible.

You cannot claim a charitable deduction for expenses that provide a substantial and direct personal benefit to someone other than the charity.

In this case, only the league entry fees were given to the league for dispersal. So only that would be deductible, since all of the other “gifts” went directly to the team members.

If you want to target your expenses to just the members of your team, is there any way to salvage a deduction?

One way is to have your company pay the expenses, instead of doing it yourself. Put the name of your company on the back of the uniforms and publicize the team’s fortunes (e.g. submit reports on the games to the local newspaper).

Result: Your company should be able to write-off the costs as business expenses. Amounts spent on outfitting and supporting a ball team qualifies as deductible advertising expenses.

And remember, barter for as much of these expenses (purchases) as possible!

For help in securing various products and services for your favorite charity contact a barter company in your area.

See the right-hand column, “Top Resources” for a listing of barter companies in the U.S.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 9:25 am and is filed under Entrepreneurs & Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.