Residents of Utah Are the Most Generous of People Who Itemize

Americans who itemized deductions on their federal income-tax returns gave a little more than 3 per cent of their earnings to charity in 1997,

ALSO SEE:

Tax Deductions for Charitable Giving, State by State

State Rankings of Charitable Deductions by Taxpayers With Incomes of $100,000 to $200,000

State Rankings of Charitable Deductions by Taxpayers With Incomes of $200,000 or More

How Chronicle Analyzed IRS Giving Data

according to a Chronicle computer analysis of the latest Internal Revenue Service data.

How much those taxpayers gave varied widely both by income level and by where they lived. Among returns of taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes of less than $20,000, those who itemized deductions gave an average of more than 10 per cent to charity — although very few taxpayers in that income bracket itemize.

Among the wealthiest Americans — those earning $200,000 or more — the average charitable deduction was 3.6 per cent of their total income. Most of those taxpayers do itemize.

The smallest percentage deductions were among those who earned $75,000 to just under $200,000: Of those who itemized, the average deduction was 2.6 per cent of income.

Comparing actual giving among states is difficult because of the large differences in the percentages of taxpayers who itemize. That is important because tax experts believe that people who don’t itemize, especially among the wealthy, give less — both in terms of total dollars and as a percentage of income — than do those who itemize. Residents of a state with a high percentage of taxpayers who do not itemize, therefore, appear to be more generous as a group than they actually are.

By any calculation, however, Utah taxpayers gave the largest share of their earnings to charity. It was among the states with the highest proportion of taxpayers who itemized deductions (36 per cent, compared with the national average of 30 per cent). But it also had the highest percentage of charitable deductions — nearly 7 per cent of income, or more than twice the national average.

Utah’s high ranking is a direct reflection of its heavily Mormon population, according to researchers who have studied patterns of charitable giving. Julian Wolpert, a Princeton University professor, notes that Mormons are supposed to give at least 10 per cent of their incomes to charity annually and that “if the percentage falls short, they’re not being very good Mormons.”

Ray Olson, executive director of the Utah chapter of the March of Dimes National Birth Defects Foundation, says he sees a clear difference in attitudes toward charity in his state. Mr. Olson has worked for charities in California, Connecticut, and Colorado and says he finds Utah residents to be more generous than those in the other three states.

“The fact that so many of the people in Utah have this charitable-giving background, by way of either Mormon or other religious belief, really spills over into organizations like the March of Dimes,” he says. “We find that the volunteers and the benefactors to our organizations are extremely generous and willing to help. And I think a lot of it is because there’s so much attention on it from a very young age.”

In seven other states, those who itemized deductions gave more than 4 per cent of their income to charity — but in every case, the percentage of taxpayers who itemized was far below the national average, making it difficult to accurately gauge generosity.

Only one jurisdiction other than Utah had both a high percentage of taxpayers’ income donated to charity and a high rate of those who itemized deductions: the District of Columbia.

At every income level, Washington taxpayers gave more than the national average to charity.

One key reason for that, say officials of Washington-area charities, is a highly effective fund-raising campaign among federal workers.

“The federal workers in this area are extremely generous,” says Deborah Stine, communications and campaign manager for the Combined Federal Campaign of the National Capital Area, which raises money from U.S. government workers. “There’s a long history of that. This year we had 54 per cent of the federal employees participate in the campaign, but every year the average gift keeps going up and up and up.”

Ms. Stine attributes that generosity to several elements of the campaign’s operation. For one, it’s run by federal workers themselves, with the soliciting done on a one-to-one basis by volunteer workers. For another, the campaign offers workers a wide variety of charities to support — more than 2,800.

Most of the states where taxpayers channeled a high percentage of income to charity were in the rural South and Midwest. Mr. Wolpert attributes that to a number of factors, one being that the governments in those regions tend to provide fewer human services than do those in states that have many urban areas.

“States like Massachusetts and New York have gotten state and local government to take on an awful lot of those activities,” he says. “There’s a much broader safety net of secular institutions. In rural states, there’s a tendency to give more money to churches, and the churches pick up a larger share of human services.”

Brad Voight, a fund raiser at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a member of the board at the National Society of Fund Raising Executives, says that while other factors play a part, it may simply be that people who live in states where religious giving is a tradition just learn to be more generous.

“Giving is a habitual activity and it’s a learned behavior,” Mr. Voight notes. “The earlier you’re trained to give and the more you give in a church setting, the greater your philanthropy will be in any other setting. That tradition and habit of giving that’s created through organized religion is certainly going to account for some differences in charitable activity around the country.”