11590

Man I just adore that guy.

11591

Cheating on your taxes is a God-given Right (!!!), don’tcha know.

What is supposedly being proposed that is so terribly onerous, anyway?

11592

Only if you’re a Republican. Everyone else should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

11593

Guy pretends he fired all his vaccinated staff to get under 100 employees. Turns out only one person was fired.

11594

FTFY. ;-)

11595

This is why we need to take all of the “I’m one of 46 nurses who just walked out because of the vaccine requirement” Twitter/reddit posts with huge grains of salt. Most of them are just straight up lies.

11596

Heh, I meant to post that in a different thread, but it probably works here too.

11597

I think they want to track bank transactions of like $600 instead of $10k or whatever it is now.

Which seems a bit much, but I don’t know much about it. And if anything the GOP freaking out about it inclines me to it being a good thing not a bad one.

11598

Yeah, I want to see what this is really about, and if it’s a thing that might actually happen. It seems like a lot to track, but I don’t want to make any assumptions because the right frequently just lies about this sort of thing.

11599

So I did look a little at the proposal, the basic idea is that services such as Venmo etc. only have to send out tax forms (1099 I think) if you receive over $20k from them. The new proposal is to reduce that requirement to $600. The idea being that a lot of people use these cash payment services to avoid tax on their incomes. Now whether $600 is an apt amount, I can’t say, but 20k is clearly too high and provides a lot of coverage for people to play around with tax avoidance schemes.

Now there is also a lot of details I have yet to find out about. And numbers on how this was reached. Because there is a lot of use cases where money isn’t really income. Think you go out to dinner with coworkers every week and split the bill using zelle. That could easily hit $600 in a year for transactions that are not reasonably considered income.

I simply don’t have the data to determine what the correct threshold would be, or how things like how my wife uses it would be impacted. We went on vacation with her sister and another couple of friends. We booked all the campsites and hotels, and they paid us back with Zelle. I don’t know how much they paid, but I would not be shocked if the total transfer was over that $600 mark.

11600

My mother wasn’t happy about it, but I was just sitting there like “I don’t get it.”

The number seems too low if the reporting is remotely burdensome. Like that’s an amount of money normal people use for normal people shit and there is no way they’re going to not run into problems from it. She was talking about rent checks and the like, but also how the banks were having issues with it since it covered so much.

I think something in the several thousands range seems more realistic if that’s the case. Most people aren’t moving around five grand constantly, but moving around $600 isn’t some insane amount of money for normal folks. $20k was obviously fine because that’s a shitload of money. I’d say that $5k or $10k is also a shitload of money for normal people.

11601

Making sure we collect taxes from piano teachers doesn’t strike me as the most fruitful mandate to give the already hilariously under-resourced IRS.

11602

Interesting. I know this is what casinos use for their reporting threshold. If you win $599 in a poker tournament you can just walk away, but if you win $600 or more you have to fill out some tax paperwork because they have to report it to the IRS.

I think the same goes for prizes. Any single prize or collection of prizes under $600 in value doesn’t need to be reported, but if you hit that magic number, you have to report it to the IRS.

11603

True, but any serious attempt to collect what (especially) millionaires and billionaires owe that they aren’t paying will necessarily require that the IRS get more resources.

11604

I was going to say that it seems that a lot of these numbers seem arbitrary. But then I worked at a couple of legal firms and I’ve seen their tax law libraries. So nevermind.

11605

And keep in mind that I believe this is annual payments, and the burden is simply having an (already existing) tax form sent. It is no additional work for the user, simply requiring the payment services to send a form they already have to send to people at a lower threshold.

My wife received a 1099 last year from her old job. It’s a standard tax form for contract employees. It really isn’t onerous, no more so than doing taxes is regularly. It just means that people running etsy shops or doing performances in the park with links to their venmo account will be receiving a 1099.

Sure. In theory this shouldn’t really cause any additional resource requirements for the IRS as it is not creating any new infrastructure or bureaucracy. It is simply changing the threshold for sending an already in use form.

11606

If a business pays you something like $600 for services they have to give you a 1099 (I think that’s it) at tax time, so it sounds like they are using the same threshhold, even though it might not directly apply.

11607

I split rent with my girlfriend and pay her back through Venmo. That’s more than $20k per year, not income for either of us.

11608

Dang, San Diego is expensive (but I already knew that).

Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if they would already send one to the government. I know one of our fellow Qt3ers had a shock IRS bill due to some school board fundraiser stuff that they used Zelle for. It wasn’t money they received, but because of how Zelle reported it the IRS went after them for taxes.

That is still ongoing. So… I don’t know how you would deal with that. You are correct that it would not be income, but I’m not sure it would be handled in that way without involving a tax accountant.

11609

“Would you betray your country and all it stands for?”
“Well, that hasn’t happened yet, so I can’t really say.”