There's been a couple of threads about this at Hardocp in reference to Folding@home. I started one under the same forum name. Unfortunately the search function appears to be fubared.... or it was over a year ago.

I tried to introduce legislation (in the US) about this but was informed that the US tax law already covers these costs under 'charitable donations' clauses. This should cover both the costs of hardware (if it's dedicated) and electric costs (if you can somehow compute the difference between regular use and 'folding also' use). Think similiar laws apply in Canada, Britain, and Australia... but not positive.

I totally agree, it would be a really nice "incentive" for participating this project while doing something for good cause.

I completely agree...
One shouldn't need economical incentives to contribute.

But, my suggestion about having WCG utilize gpu power as well as described in another post - and offering that same power while the comp is in use would be a nice little win win situation :)

Let me start by saying IANATA (I Am Not A Tax Attorney) but my understanding of charitable donations is that you can only donate the actual expenses you incur. For example, you incur additional electric costs by running WCG (your CPU is not in its power-saving idle mode, and is therefore consuming more electricity.) If you knew how much additional electricity (and could place a cost on it) you could deduct it. I once figured my distributed.net client was causing my Athlon 1200 to burn an additional 60 watts/hour, and would have cost me about $50.00 a year in electricity (which is why I think distributed.net is a huge waste of natural resources.)

WCG can't provide this info, though, because it's absolutely CPU core specific. A 90 nm Pentium IV is going to burn less electricity than a 120 nm chip, and cost you less. Every chip out there has its own unique power consumption delta between idle and fully used, which means it's up to you to measure it. And then, you'd have to measure the difference between "your" usage and the "WCG" usage and subtract out time you spent at the keyboard, playing Everquest or whatever.

As far as the "value" of the computing you are performing, I'm pretty sure it's not deductable at all. For example, your physical labor and time are not deductable expenses -- I just spent a few weekends building a garage for a charitable organization, but I can't deduct a dime other than actual out-of-pocket expenses, such as 14.5 cents per mile driving to and from the job site, and a dollar for a box of staples. I would think offering the services of an enslaved microchip to be of even less value than my time.

Now, if you bought a brand new box for the purpose of running WCG client on it, and you actually ran nothing but WCG on it (not so much as a game of solitaire) then you could deduct the depreciated cost of the computer (that's the price of the computer divided out over its three year lifetime) plus the full cost of the electricity you used to feed it. In order to get that to fly through an IRS audit, though, you'd probably have to arrange it with WCG in advance. That would probably still be a tough one to sell to the IRS, though, to spend several hundred dollars on a computer you don't use for yourself.

No matter what, if you actually intend to try to claim a charitable deduction for this, you should seek the advice of a professional tax accountant before spending the money on the donation. Tax "advice" you get for free on the internet is worthless, no matter what or who the source is.

This was covered in great depth many years ago at UD - (whose program you are using) and the point is IBM, or UD is not a charity and those are the ones who you are donating to! So you cannot claim you are donating to a charity.