To preface this story, I do video work. I don’t consider myself a professional, due to the fact that I don’t do it for a living, and my equipment isn’t up to a professional level (I tend to borrow a lot.)

So, a video job comes to me through my work. Now, I work for a non-profit organization, which has certain stipulations imposed upon them by the Feds. I have done side work for the college here in the past, and the use of their equipment has never been an issue before. Until this time.

I was called into the office of my department director. She told me she knows about the side work, doing it is fine, however I cannot use any of my employer’s equipment to do the work. Apparently, the IRS has tightened the screws down on not-for-profit institutions to where if they hire an outside contractor to do work, they can’t use any of the non-profit’s tools to do the job.

What?

So, let’s paint this picture. A contractor is hired to install a light fixture. Let’s say his ladder breaks and there is a ladder in the maintenance closet 10 feet from where he’s working, but it’s owned by the not-for-profit organization he’s doing the work for. By federal law, he can’t borrow that ladder for 10 minutes to finish his job. Is the contractor who borrowed my ladder to punch down cables in my office guilty of breaking IRS regs?

Now, how does this relate with intellectual property? What if a programmer is hired to work on a piece of software that the not-for-profit owns? Obviously they would have to use their own computer to do the work. What about database work? Would the entire contents of the database need to be moved off site for the contractor to work on? How would that affect confidentiality of the data? How would the contractor upload the data back to the not-for-profit’s systems? Give it over to them and say “Good luck.” Attach his computer to their network, risking the network security of the not-for-profit to do the job? In that instance, the contractor would have to join the domain to have any kind of rights to the not-for-profit’s network. What if the contractor doesn’t want to do that?

What the real picture here is that any institution should have the right to hire a contractor to do work, and provide whatever tools necessary for that contractor to do the job they hired them to do. To do otherwise is foolish.

What else is foolish is that the IRS considers items provided to employees, such as cell phones, to be additional income for that employee, even though they can only use it for work purposes. So, my work provides me with a tool to do my job that I can only use to do my job, and I am now taxed on it as if it were income? Are they going to take an inventory of my office and tax me for the cost of the pliers, hammers, screws, and punch down tools I have? Maybe they should tax employees for the right to use the restroom too. Sheesh.!Pure unadulterated imbecility.

I applaud my not-for-profit employer for having the integrity to follow the law, regardless of how naive and thoughtless. They have chosen the high path, and I believe that God will bless them for doing so. I wonder how many organizations out there are not following the law in these regards?

Nevertheless, these laws are more examples of the ineptitude and corruptness of the federal government, and their intrusion into the freedom of our daily lives. Why should some mindless bureaucrat in DC have the power to hamper not-for-profit organizations across the country? This was not the intent of our founding fathers when they started this great nation.

The federal government’s job is to stay the heck out of people’s lives and defend our freedom. That’s it. The more the nanny state grows, the more our freedoms slip away. Remember that when you vote. The politician that promises more from the government is only promising despotism wrapped up in a pretty package.