and things went downhill from there

Dear Charitable Organization,

We got your package in the mail, telling us about all the wonderful things you do, and begging us for another donation.

I just wanted to take a moment to explain why we stopped donating to your organization.

A couple of years back we attended a (not inexpensive) benefit dinner for your group. We sat through the various presentations and testimonials, and decided that we liked the work that you were doing around the world. Before we left, we made a fairly substantial donation to help purchase some things that you had identified as an urgent need. You issued us a temporary tax receipt at the time, and I carefully printed our full name and address in the donation book for our actual tax receipt.

When we filed our taxes, we used the temporary receipt under the operating assumption that we would add the final one to the file when it finally arrived. When tax day came and went, and we still hadn't got our paperwork from you, atara called to get the status on our receipt. When you told her that you had mailed it some time ago, she checked to ensure that you had sent it to the correct address.

Apparently, you hadn't.

In fact...

By your own admission, you had ignored the address that I had given you and just looked up my first and last name on Google. Then you mailed off our tax documents to the first address that came up. To be more specific, you sent our confidential financial papers to the first person you could find in a Google search.

atara had you correct the address in your system, and then politely asked if you could reissue the receipt. You assured us that you could not. Once the receipt was certified and issued, there was nothing you could do, and it was no longer your problem. Fair enough for you, but it wouldn't help if we got audited by Revenue Canada.

Speaking of which...

Guess who got audited because we made a larger-than-normal donation that year? We explained to the CRA that we had filed using the temporary receipt we'd been issued, and that the good folks at the charity had sent our permanent receipt to a random person in the same city. Fortunately, they accepted that answer.

But if you are so badly organized that you can't even send out a receipt to a donor, we have no confidence in how you are handling our potential donations.

So we won't be giving you money again this year.

I mean, you really do have your sights set on doing good things.

We're just giving the money to charities that we trust.

Sincerely, Plonq.


I've been meaning to make afternoon tea a more routine thing in my life. Perhaps my new Christmas mug might help me along on that front.

We just got our property reassessment from the city. Apparently they have taken our benign neglect of the property for the past five years as a sign that we have been gilding the inside of the house because our assessed property value has jumped a bit. Enough, actually, that using the city's on-line tax calculator we can expect to pay 215% more for our next property tax bill. O_O

That's based on the 2008 rate, mind you.