Reps have brought to the Council attention that they are taxed from the money they receive as reimbursements.
Please share your experiences on that so we can elaborate a SOP and a standard (hopefully in most cases) Letter that you can use to prove that this money is being received as a donation/refund so you wont have to pay taxes for it.
I have not been able to make new budget request, since our first reimbursement did not go through due to the unavailability of Paypal service in Mauritius . I guess if Council adopt a resolution regarding transfer through WU, then we shall be able to make budget request as WU in available here.
The only budget that I received up to now was for the launching of Fx29 through a bank transfer…I wish same could be applied in future.
Else, I covered expenses for almost all our events, which in a way is our personal contribution to Mozilla…Here we don’t have tax on money received but bank charges for currency conversion. I think if budget is transferred in local currency the charges would then be met from the point of transfer, that is Mozilla
Hi Guys,
I am sharing this link which help creating a standard SOP for Tax. These are Income tax slabs for India.
Thanks for bringing this up.
From what I see, it’s impossible to avoid taxes with these transfers.
I did not care about this 1 year ago or so, but now that I have my own startup and need to do my finances, 15% taxes on such payments is severe (that’s how much it is in Albania, terrible)
So either I need to pay 15% of any budget by myself, Mozilla needs to include also taxes in the payment, or I (and other Albanian reps) should avoid budget requests altogether.
All options are hard compromises and it’s a difficult matter as this needs to be analyzed for every country ideally.
This is not so bad see this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_schedule_(federal_income_tax)
I’m glad were finally having a bigger discussion about this though because I brought this up at summit in 2013 and asked for a letter then.
Hey,
in that case you can get reimbursed via wire transfer, it is now an option for even an advance payment 
The way that I see it, is that we need to phrase this as reimbursement and not as income. Since you guys have the receipts there, we have an advantage on that. I’ll work with the accounting and ask for advice on how to deal with situations like that. The more info you add here the better.
Hi spillai,
Unfortunately other options as Western Union are not available because it has high fees on transfers, and also we don’t have an electronic account for it, so Konstantina has to walk to a nearby WU station to put a transfer, we have tried several times to get a NGO account for WU but it has not been fruitful.
Currently Wire Transfers are possible for those Reps in countries where Paypal is not available, but it takes more time since it has to be processed by Mozilla Accounting team and not directly by Reps, if in the future you want to use a Wire Transfer please let Konstantina know and she will give you the details about it.
Thanks for this update. Sure I’ll contact Konstantina for our request.