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When you see an ad on the television that asks you to consider donating a car to charity, they certainly do make it sound simple and irresistible. If you have a car you can't use, don't pay the removal people take it away. Instead, donate it to a children's charity for free and get to claim a tax deduction next April. What could be simpler?

Ever since donating a car to charity became a common thing back in the 90s, it's only attracted more and more people. What could be simpler, they tell themselves, than to donate a rusty old car to a children's charity, feel good about helping them, and then to claim a deduction?

Around 8 years ago though, the IRS came in and tightened its regulations. They've made it more difficult for people who donate cars that are worth nothing and try to claim to the IRS that they’ve just donated a really valuable car.

It's hard to believe that it can happen in America, but it does. To hundreds of thousands of children every day who belong to desperately poor families, there's never enough food, never enough to wear and never enough access to medicine. As hard as they try, children's charities are simply not able to keep up. One of the best ways they have of trying to keep up involves a rather strange kind of charity-seeking – it is the car donation charity.

As odd as it may sound, the car donation charity system is really one of the more important things to keep children's charities afloat.

The whole idea of donating cars to children's charities came up about 15 years ago when used car dealers thought of a little trick to get a little extra generosity from the IRS. They would donate cars that were nearly junk to children's charities, and they would tell the IRS that they had donated really valuable cars. They would seek high-value deductions for those clunkers.