New TIGTA Audit Report - Many Taxpayers Improperly Reporting Car Donations

TIGTA just issued a significant report about Non-Cash Charitable Contributions.   You often hear radio commercials about donations of cars to charities.   Taxpayers who do this must attach Form 8283 to the 1040 and provide information for the IRS to match a Form 1098-C from the Charity which reports to actual sales price of the vehicle sold for the charity.   Most of those cars are sold at auto auctions.    What TIGTA reported was that the majority of these large donations were improperly reported by the taxpayers for 2010.   They estimated 273,000 taxpayers improperly received 2010 tax refunds of $1.1 Billion for these donations.  

This will lead to more audits on these type of contributions by the IRS for 2011 and 2012 years.   Watch out for this in preparing 2012 returns.

A short version of the TIGTA report is attached as a PDF file.   You can subscribe to these TIGTA reports at www.treasury.gov/tigta to get these reports which tend to indicate what problems the IRS will be concentrating upon in the near future.