Items that you donate to a tax deductible organization may be listed on your tax return as itemized deductions. Whether you benefit from the deduction depends on your overall tax situation. You may deduct items donated to a deductible organization even if you work for the organization. However, your donations should be acknowledged by a receipt or letter of some kind, and to prevent accusations of self dealing, you should not be the person to sign the letter.
Specifically, if someone donates office supplies to a deductible organization, they should receive a letter from the organization acknowledging or thanking them for the donation of office supplies. The letter does not have to specify the dollar value, because that supported from the donor’s sales receipts or other records. But the donor does need to receive some kind of acknowledgment from the organization. The concern with self dealing arises if you are the person who would normally sign such letters. In that case, you should find someone else in authority to sign the letter acknowledging and thanking you for the donation. That avoids the accusation that you were issuing false letters to yourself so that you could claim false deductions.
Separately, you can only claim a deduction for the value of items that become the property of the organization, or that are used up in providing services to the organization. You cannot deduct anything for the partial use or loan of items. If you purchased furniture for your own use while working at the organization, that is not considered a donation. If you decided to leave the items at the organization, when you left, it would become a donation at that time, however, the value would be the fair market value for used furniture as of the date of the donation and not your original purchase price. You would only be entitled to consider the original purchase price a donation, if you made an unconditional gift of the items to the organization for the organization to have, and do with whatever they wished whenever they wished.
(Another example: a friend of mine donated an electric piano to my church, on the condition that the church could not sell it, or dispose of it, and if the church didn’t want it, they had to give it back to my friend. That was not a deductible donation.)
