abstract.tex (1893B)
1 \begin{abstract} 2 This project describes the design of a privacy-preserving donation 3 system. The central entity in the design is the donation authority 4 (Donau) which was implemented in free software in the context of the 5 GNU Taler project. While implemented primarily for GNU Taler, the 6 system could in principle work with other payment systems. 7 8 Providing evidence of charitable donations for tax deductions often requires 9 sensitive personal information, raising privacy concerns. 10 Donors may wish to anonymize receipts while still being able to make 11 legitimate donations to recognized charities. On the other side tax authorities 12 may wish to better prevent donation fraud with verifiable signatures. 13 Deductions for unrecognized charities or failure to deduct valid foreign 14 donations also occur. A system allowing anonymous yet verifiable donation 15 receipts would address these issues. The Donau would be operated by a tax 16 authority. The Donau backend 17 implements a REST API used primarily by charities and donors. It 18 maintains a list of recognized charities, enabling tax authorities to 19 audit the total amount of donation receipts each charity is 20 issuing. Upon making a donation to one of the charities the donor 21 receives a \textit{donation receipt} which will be stored locally on 22 the donor’s device. Throughout this process neither the charity nor 23 the Donau obtains any identifiable information about the donor, 24 thus enabling anonymous donations. To simplify the verification for 25 the tax authority, the donor needs to submit their donation receipts 26 to the Donau at the end of the year. At that time, the Donau can 27 combine the individual donation receipts in one final annual 28 \textit{donation statement}. Upon request of the tax authority, the 29 donor can provide this donation statement to the tax authority which 30 can check its validity and can then approve the tax deduction. 31 32 \end{abstract}