Comments
I don't really understand what would be in it for the corporation, but I haven't thought very deeply about it. (This is all from a US perspective. I'm using Coca-Cola as the company in my examples given its use in the post, and GiveWell as the potential charity).
Under I.R.C. 170(b)(2)(A), most corporations can deduct charitable contributions up to 10% of their taxable income. More discussion here. Maybe companies could try claiming their matching donations as an employment-related business expense instead of as a charitable donation per se, but I doubt (e.g.) Coca-Cola is running up against that 10% cap on the latter. I suspect that few corporations need the matching program to get credit for donating more from a tax perspective.[1]
If Coca-Cola wanted to give money to GiveWell (conditioned on strangers also giving money), trying to do this through an employee-matching system rather than through a more direct method seems awfully convoluted to me. I'm guessing Coca-Cola would prefer to give in a way that maximized the reputational benefits flowing it to / made its donation look as big as possible, and that experts in fundraising could tell them how to best accomplish that. I'm not sure why Coca-Cola would want to reinvent the wheel here.
If for some reason Coca-Cola wanted to give more money through employee matching in general, then it would have the option of increasing the generosity of their matches for authentic employee donations. From its perspective, that seems a superior option in light of the usual goals of an employee-match program. To the extent that the corporation thinks there is PR benefit from higher employee donations, that isn't going to fly when it comes to light that the employees were acting as mere conduits for strangers. Moreover, one would expect more of an employee morale/retention boost for charities the staff strongly cared about (and their willingness to donate some of their own money is a signal about existence and intensity of staff preference).
So I'm not sure I see a clear use case here unless an employer (1) wants to give money to specific charities we endorse, (2) wants to do that through an employee-matching program for reasons that I am not predicting, and (3) feels that public disclosure of what is going on would not undermine the employer's objectives. If I'm missing something, then figuring out what it is might be helpful in thinking through strategy.
If a company is willing to match $10,000 per employee per year, they may be flexible about whether the money comes from the employee or others in the community — the company’s contribution is the same either way and the company still enjoys the upsides of giving.
That being said: I assume that a company that is willing to match up to $10,000 per year first obtained projections on how much that policy would actually cost on a per-employee basis. I doubt they budgeted close to $10K/employee/year for this, although I don't know what the participation rates are in reality. This site suggests ~31.25% of matching funds might be claimed.
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The most obvious exception would be those without taxable income. But even then, I suspect there may be less risky ways to justify charitable donations as an ordinary business expense than through what sounds a whole lot like straw donors. Cf. Marquis v. Comm'r, 49 T.C. 485 (1968) (charitable deductions allowed as business expenses, albeit under somewhat unusual circumstances).
This seems great to me, kudos for organizing. I'm sure a bunch of people will be interested to see the outcome of this.
If it's successful, I imagine it might be able to be scaled.