It’s complicated.
The legal donor for a gift is the entity to whom the money or property belonged at the time that it was irrevocably transferred to the donee. It seems to me that, in the case at hand, the money never belonged to the church, so the church could not be the donor.
On the other hand, in the absence of a clear agency relationship, we customarily infer ownership of the asset from the ownership of the account from which the funds were transferred to us. (For example, if someone collects cash from other people, deposits the cash, and writes us a check, absent other considerations, we do not record gifts from those other people, even if the intermediary tells us that they were the people who made the gift.) In the current scenario, the funds were transferred from the church’s account.
There is also an issue related to the date of the gift. If the church were to refund to the donor the gift that it deposited in error, and the donor wrote a new check, the gift would occur when that new check was received (or postmarked), which might be in a different tax period that the one in which the donor made their initial gift, which would have been the gift date if the church had forwarded the gift to the payee to whom the donor wrote the check.
It also occurs to me to wonder whether the church might not have reached out to the original donor. If not, and you now receipt the original donor, the interactions might be complicated.
Only your duly-appointed counsel can offer definitive advice.
As I understand the situation, it’s hard to see how the church could be the donor. It was never their money, and the issue is the ownership of the money, not whose hands were on it last.
If the church contacted the donor to explain the error and the donor asked the church to forward the money to Gustavus Adolphus, I would be sympathetic to the view that the church was then acting as the agent of the donor and record the gift as a gift from the originating donor. If the church acted on their own initiative and counsel thought it was OK, I would not object to recording the gift as a gift from the originating donor either.
I would lean toward issuing a receipt providing detail that documents that transaction in its several steps, with dates, so that, whatever processing date might appear on the receipt, the donor and the donor’s advisor could make a determination about the period in which to claim any deduction, which is the donor’s responsibility (in the currently-unlikely case that the donor is in a position to claim a deduction for a charitable contribution).
My US$0.02 worth; the usual disclaimers apply.
Good luck!
Alan
Alan S. Hejnal
Data Quality Manager
Smithsonian Institution - Office of Advancement
600 Maryland Avenue SW, Suite 600E
P.O. Box 37012, MRC 527
Washington, DC 20013-7012
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From: Advancement Services Discussion List <
FUNDSVCS@LISTSERV.FUNDSVCS.ORG> On Behalf Of Gwen Donev
Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2019 9:11 AM
To:
FUNDSVCS@LISTSERV.FUNDSVCS.ORG
Subject: [FUNDSVCS] Third party error
We recently received the copy of a check which a donor had written to us, but was cashed in error by the church where a memorial service was held. The church made out a new check to us, saying they had cashed the check in error and asking us to honor the donor's intent. Our understanding is that we have to process the payment as a donation from the church, as that is who this check is coming from, not from the original donor. Is that correct, even though the church did not issue a receipt to the donor?
Gwen
--
Gwen Donev
Director of Advancement Services
Gustavus Adolphus College
800 West College Avenue
Saint Peter, Minnesota 56082
Email:
gwendonev@gustavus.edu<mailto:
gwendonev@gustavus.edu>
Office: 507.933.6515