Before you donate

The funds to maintain our operations come from:

• private citizens who support us with donations for our statutory objectives and participate in crowdfunding campaigns;
• the 1.5% tax deduction of private citizens’ income tax;
• private grant-giving institutions;
• public institutions as part of bids to complete specific tasks;
• companies which support us with statutory objective donations or grants to complete projects;
• profits on our business activities;
• bank interest and term deposits.

The Foundation may also acquire money from inheritance, bequests and public collections (according to §10 of its statute).

The Panoptykon Foundation puts its independence first. Therefore, we do not use fund sources which could limit our independence in controlling public and private institutions.

You will find detailed information on where our funds come from on panoptykon.org in the Funding subpage.

Donations can be made to Panoptykon by natural persons of legal age, legal entities or organizational units without legal personality (as per Polish law).

Any of these entities can make a donation via a traditional bank transfer or a postal order to the Foundation’s account (IBAN: PL43 1440 1101 0000 0000 1044 6058 PKO Bank Polski, SWIFT: BPKOPLPW), with the payment reference: „Darowizna na cele statutowe” (Statutory objective donation). If you would like to stay in touch with us, add your e-mail address.

Moreover, natural persons can make a donation via their debit or credit card, or an electronic bank transfer in an online banking system (in Polish zloty – PLN). These donations may start at 5 PLN and reach a maximum of 15,000 PLN. The Panoptykon Foundation will receive between 97% and 99.65% of the sum you donate through this channel. The rest is the service provider’s fee which depends on the form of payment. On the part of the Panoptykon Foundation, the donations are serviced by its internal CiviCRM system.

Communication with the panoptykon.org website, the CiviCRM system and the payment service provided by FISERV Polska S.A. is conducted via an encrypted HTTPS protocol. We recommend that you use an updated version of a browser such as Firefox or Chromium (information on the newest version is available on the companies’ websites). In order to make a donation through our website and FISERV, you do not need Java or Flash. When making electronic payments, remember to follow the basic principles of online safety, such as using safe passwords or never logging into your online banking system on a Wi-Fi network you do not trust.

We reserve the right to return a donation that we suspect is an attempt to influence our independence.

Under Polish law, donations made for statutory objectives are tax deductible (for natural persons up to 6% of their income, for legal entities up to 10%). The donated sum needs to be documented for tax purposes. With traditional bank transfers and bank orders, a payment receipt with Panoptykon’s bank account number is provided. When using FISERV, the system generates a document, and the Foundation needs to confirm that it has received your payment (for confirmation, e-mail us at fundacja@panoptykon.org).

Donate

The 1.5% can be donated by natural persons who have generated taxable income in a given fiscal year (regardless of the way they file their taxes). In order to support Panoptykon, enter our National Court Register number KRS 0000327613 on your tax return.

Taxpayers may donate 1.5% of their tax to a selected public benefit organization (as per Polish law), regardless of whether they file their taxes via the Internet, by post or directly at a tax office. Another possibility is tax software, which often comes free of charge (but before you use a program, make sure it allows you to support any organization you choose).

When donating your 1.5%, if you consent for your data to be shared with us, within several months the Tax Office will send us your name, surname and address, and inform us about the sum you donated as 1.5% of your tax. This allows us to thank you for your support. If you file your taxes jointly with your spouse, their data will also be shared with us. Apart from this, you could add other information for us in your tax form, such as your e-mail address.

The personal data of the people who have made a donation or given their 1.5% (and consented for their information to be shared with us by the Tax Office) is processed according to data protection laws and our Privacy Policy. Our policy describes the scope and methods of data processing and the entitlements of the people whose data we process.

Our operations rely on the work and knowledge of our team members and collaborators. Therefore, most of our budget (ca. 80%) is spent on paying the people who write legal opinions, handbooks and articles for our website, train others, make graphics or coordinate our work together. We take care to minimize administrative expenses, which now amount to ca. 10% of our budget. The remaining 10% are other expenses related to our tasks, such as publication printing. Financial statements presenting the Foundation’s annual expenses are published on the Funding subpage.

Decisions about what we do and how we disburse our funds are made by the Management Board based on the Foundation’s statute and its long-term strategy developed with its team members and its Supervisory Board.

The Supervisory Board is the supervising body of the Panoptykon Foundation. According to the Foundation’s statute (§14), the Supervisory Board’s tasks include the supervision and control over the Foundation’s operations, specifically the oversight of its finances, the approval of the Management Board’s annual reports and granting a vote of acceptance to the Management Board.

According to our statute, we are also subject to oversight by the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Poland, and – as a public benefit organization – to the Ministry of Family, Labour and Social Policy to which we submit an annual operations report. Because our organization is also registered as a business, we submit financial reports to the court responsible for the National Court Register. Moreover, we are overseen by other state institutions, such as the Tax Office (where we submit annual financial reports), the Social Insurance Institution, the Supreme Audit Office, the Inspector General for Personal Data Protection and many others.

Because we use grants, we submit additional reports according to the requirements of the organizations that award us the means to complete specific projects. The institutions control both whether the project was conducted according to plan, and whether the funds awarded were spent according to the budget.

Information on our operations is published regularly on our website: panoptykon.org. The website also includes lists of our receipts and expenses in past years, financial reports (in the Funding subpage) and program reports, which can also be found in the Polish Public Benefit Organization Database maintained by the National Freedom Institute. The fact that we engage in advocacy at the level of European institutions is also disclosed in European Union’s Transparency Register.

The Polish Corporate Income Tax Act obliges us to publish information on legal entities which have made a single donation exceeding 15,000 PLN or multiple donations exceeding 35,000 PLN over one year.