The 'donau' URI scheme for validation of donation statements.
draft-grothoff-donau-02

Abstract

This document defines the 'donau' Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme for triggering interactions with a validator for Donau donation statements. This URI scheme allows applications to trigger interactions with a Donau validator. A Donau validator is typically run by a tax authority to validate tax records from citizens that made donations to a charity that supports the Donau protocol. The Donau validator will receive 'donau' URIs representing the sum of donations a taxpayer made to recognized charities over a year. Donors would submit 'donau' URLs (or QR codes with 'donau' URLs) to tax authorities to have their donations recognized by the tax authority as tax-deductible expenditures. The application logic to verify the validity of the donation is triggered by 'donau' URIs. The validator application would then typically confirm to the tax official the validity of the signature encoded in the URI and show the total amount donated as well as the taxpayer identification number and the year of the donation. Multiple URIs could be submitted per donor, and the application can correctly determine which submissions are cumulative and which ones are redundant. This specification only covers the syntax of the 'donau' URI scheme and excludes details on the protocol(s) that would allow taxpayers to donate to recognized charities to obtain these suitable signed donation statements. While a privacy-preserving protocol to obtain such statements exists within the context of the GNU Taler protocol suite, other protocols could be developed in the future and still yield compatible 'donau' URIs as the URI scheme is reasonably generic. The validation tool will be registered for all donau:// URIs. Since each taxation authority will typically use a different domain, it will not be feasible to encode all the domains of tax authorities servers inside the validation tool. Hence a new URI scheme is needed that will trigger the validation tool for any domain name.

Authors

Christian Grothoff
Emmanuel Benoist
Bohdan Potuzhnyi
Florian Dold

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)