The costs of citizen science (part ii)

Until very recently I've been volunteering as, what I'm not sure - something between a cataloguer and a curator - to document the contents of Dow's pharmacy in Chiltern.

Back in 2020 I blogged about the costs of being a volunteer.

While they're not substantial, they do exist, but equally I've spent just as much money on my other interests - researching Victorian murderers, old cameras and family history, so I can't really complain.

However, coincident with finishing up on Dow's I filled in this year's tax return. 

I don't work, I'm retired and we live on our superannuation and aged pension payments, but I also get a small pension from the UK Department of Work and Pensions.

The fiction is that this is treated as if it was earned  income and taken into account by both Centrelink and the Australian Tax Office. It normally sits comfortably below the thresholds for tax or being penalised for working while claiming Centrelink benefits, but recently our dollar has not being doing that well against the pound,  its value has increased.

So, I wondered if there was a way of offsetting expenses incurred as a volunteer against tax, just as I did when I was working.

The answer's utterly unambiguous. 

No.

The ATO has the perfectly reasonable viewpoint that if you are a volunteer, you are donating your time freely, and cannot be deemed an employee or self-employed. Interestingly the ATO do recognise that you may have out of pocket expenses as a volunteer and that rather than reclaiming petty cash payments for things like rubber gloves and notebooks, it's perfectly acceptable to be paid as small honorarium, ie an ex gratia lump sum payment in lieu of any petty cash expenses incurred.

In fact it's a pretty sensible approach.

However, we have a little problem here. In both the ATO's view, and  organisation such as Volunteering Victoria, a volunteer is a volunteer, no matter what they do. 

So, if you go along to an archaeological project, say, and wash pottery fragments, you'll have a great time and probably won't have much in the way of out of pocket expenses. If you volunteer as a finds officer on the same project, collecting and documenting these fragments, you'll need gloves, tweezers, magnifying glasses and access to a computer, and perhaps some cloud storage for data backup.

Again the costs are minimal, but may be a barrier to some people lending their expertise.

Having done the whole volunteer thing I think there regrettably needs to be a bit more formality about the process of becoming a volunteer with some sort of dummy contract that as well as rights and responsibilities, covers how minor expenses will be handled, hopefully in a way that does not cause a bureaucratic overhead.