Congress is now cracking down on tax abuses by non-profit groups, and seeking to reduce the deductions people claim when they donate their car or land to charity. While they’re at it, they will take a close look at one tax loophole so big that you could drive a herd of endangered elephants through it.
Trophy hunters are shooting rare animals around the world and donating their mounted prizes to non-profit museums in order to take a tax deduction. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the Smithsonian or a phony museum set up in the hunter’s living room. A big-game hunter can shoot an exotic animal in Asia, in Africa or at a drive-through “canned hunt” here in the U.S. –and write off his vacation at the expense of the IRS and American taxpayers.
Illinois trophy hunter R. Bruce Duncan, founder of the Chicago Appraisers Association, has made a cottage industry of appraising big-game mounts for hunters’ tax deductions. The CAA claims it has appraised more than 250,000 game mounts for hunters who want to donate their animals to a museum. Its promotional materials entice hunters with “the seven secrets of tax-deductible hunting,” telling clients they can “hunt for free,” and even boasting that IRS acceptance is guaranteed.
The appraisals of trophy animals are, of course, extraordinarily generous, and often made by viewing photographs without even seeing the actual mount. Just calculate the cost of airfare, guide fees, licenses, hunting permits, skinners, trackers, shipping, taxidermy, tips for guides and the “replacement value” of the animal, and you can make each hunt pay for the next. In an ironic twist of so-called conservation, the more animals that are hunted, the more rare the species becomes, and thus the higher “value” of the animal and tax break to the hunter. The CAA recommended values of up to $5,000 for a zebra, $13,500 for a brown bear and $45,000 for a desert sheep.
Duncan was sentenced to 10 months in prison in 1991 and fined $47,000 for helping to place the trophy mounts of endangered animals in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. At the time, in a Los Angeles Times article, Assistant U.S. Atty. Richard H. Moore of Raleigh, who prosecuted the criminal case, was quoted as saying: “If you saw the stuff, you’d know it was junk with a capital J. They had whitetail deer that had been appraised at $5,000 to $6,000 for heaven’s sake. And you can’t drive around North Carolina without hitting one of them.”
According to The Washington Post, many of Duncan’s appraised trophies end up as donations to the Wyobraska Wildlife Museum in Gering, Neb., where more than 800 big-game and exotic trophy mounts gather dust in a railroad car. The trophies are destined for auction, where they can be purchased by the hunters who shot them and donated them to the pseudo-museum, at bargain prices. Trophies typically sell for 10 to 20 percent of their appraised value–a fraction of what the hunter earned as a tax deduction.
Shipping the trophy to a warehouse, letting your hunting buddies see your prized animals in your living room, or even just promising to donate your mounts sometime in the future, all can earn hunters big tax breaks. The trophy hunting organization Safari Club International holds seminars titled “SCI, the IRS, and You,” and offers tips on how hunters can consider themselves “museum curators” for charitable purposes. They even suggest turning part of your house into a “wildlife museum” and holding a charitable “sensory safari” for the blind.
There’s certainly nothing charitable about shooting rare animals and calling your living room a “museum.” As Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a hearing on tax abuses, “It looks like it’s time for these self-enriching hunters to become the hunted. … We need to take the tax cheating out of taxidermy.”
Grassley and other members of Congress are right to hunt for non-profit abuses, and to stop trophy hunters from bilking the treasury of millions of dollars. It’s time to shoot down this taxidermy tax scam.
