Charitable donation receipts

When a retail store takes donations for a charity and issues a cash register tape as a receipt, that is not an official charitable donation receipt and will not be accepted by your efiler as being official receipting.  If you wanted to make a claim, you'd have to contact the retailer.

In order to obtain a donation receipt, the retailer must be able to prove the donation was from a particular customer, by way of some customer identifier, and then may request a donation receipt from the charity to be issued to the person.

When it gets interesting is whether or not the retail store has received a donation receipt for the donations made by it's customers.  If they have, and the customers now request a receipt, the charity would have to amend the receipt to the retailer reducing it by the amount claimed by the individual customers.  One wonders how many times a charity would be willing to do this when the customers donate a few dollars each, or in some cases, $100 or more, to a national retailer.  I'd hate to be in the position of attempting to negotiate with the charity to restate every time a customer wants a receipt. 

Of course, if the retailer didn't claim the funds received as income (which it would be), and didn't ask for a receipt, that's a bit easier on everyone.