No Legislation to Deny Income Tax Deductions for Charity is Planned by Government

The question of whether the government is contemplating legislation which would deny deduction of charitable contributions from income tax returns – a question in which the United Jewish Appeal and other charitable organizations have been interested since President Roosevelt’s address to the nation on April 28 on new taxation – has been officially answered in the negative in a letter received here today from the Treasury Department by Isidore Sobeloff, executive director of the Jewish Welfare Federation of Detroit.

“I am pleased to inform you that this Department has not recommended and does not contemplate recommending any legislation which would reduce or deny the allowance of a deduction for charitable contributions that is provided for income tax purposes,” D. W. Bell, Acting Secretary of the Treasury, wrote to Mr. Sobeloff.

The statement from the Treasury Department was in reply to an inquiry addressed by Mr. Sobeloff to President Roosevelt in which the President was asked to indicate whether the system of deductible exemption for charitable contributions would be continued in reckoning net income on which taxes against 1942 incomes are due.

Pointing out that such a statement would encourage contributors to the Allied Jewish Campaign in Detroit who are in the higher income brackets, Mr. Sobeloff in his inquiry added that “if a statement from a governmental source announced that proposed legislation did not contemplate deduction of customary charity contribution credit income before taxes,” it might be helpful to all charitable appeals this year and not only to the Detroit campaign in particular.

“Any statement, however, issued even in the most general and tentative terms would stimulate continued generous giving if such contributions could be made in the knowledge that raising of additional taxes need not affect giving to philanthropies as indeed you so kindly have declared previously before the new tax law for the current year was proposed,” Mr. Sobeloff’s inquiry to the President stated.