beardedlamb

been meaning to write this bitch post for a while now…
so i did some oob paperwork recently so that we, as a new non-profit in texas could be a full on 501 c 3 in the far-reaching eyes of the IRS. the end of this hug packet taht requires me to produce loads of attachments and addendums and old budgets and crazy crap that i bet they dont even look at for longer than 3 seconds is the final section which requests my user fee. if the company averages less than $10,000 in gross income for each year previous to applying, the fee is $300. This is high, I’m thinking, but manageable. Of course, if your gross receipts happen to be something like $2,000 that’s a huge portion of your budget. But this doesn’t apply to oob. we do more than $10,000 in gross receipts if you include show admissions, grant money, sponsorship, and submission fees. the fee for companies that do over $10,000 is $750. This pisses me off quite a bit because we’re not so far over that 10,000 threshold that it doesn’t take a huge bite out of our budget. imagine if our avg. annual receipts were $10,001. that means it would cost me 7.5% of my entire yearly budget to apply for this tax exempt status. as it is, for us, its not 7.5% but its still a sizable chunk when you consider all our yearly costs and the fact that i want to compensate the people who are working so hard to put this great thing on. just seems a bit steep when all they’re doing is looking at 30 pages of numbers and check boxes and saying that i’m allowed to do something. i honestly dont see why they’re taking such a huge chunk of money away from companies that have been created for the good of the public. sure, putting on a comedy festival isnt the most noble of pursuits but if i was building a hospital for octogenarian refuges from the canadian syrup mines and my gross annual receipts were $10,001, i’d have to adjust my whole budget by a considerable amount for the FIRST year of my business.
this sucks.

let the record show that i disagree with this.

b