If you resold Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets, the IRS is watching — A new rule from the IRS is punishing those who resold tickets for more than $600 in profit with a tax penalty::A new rule from the IRS is punishing those who resold tickets for more than $600 in profit with a tax penalty.
Somehow I doubt this will affect Ticketmaster, the biggest scalper of all
er, by default any profit is taxable for them while as a lemming you get a tax free $600 profit before it impacts you
but fuck ticketmaster anyway
I’m pretty sure they pay effectively zero tax because they found some interesting ways to make their profit appear 0 on paper.
I own a business and can agree with this statement.
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I don’t understand what your point is. Of course this doesn’t impact Ticketmaster. They already pay taxes on income generated from selling tickets, so nothing changes. I can’t tell if you’re just saying dumb shit to get upvotes from other idiots or truly don’t have a clue.
Fuck scalpers
But fuck fixing taxes to make billionaires and churches pay taxes… eat the people as they say.
If you resell tickets for 600$ in profit, you’re not “the people”, you’re a scalper and I have no sympathy for you. This is a good rule.
That’s just capitalists capitalizing. The IRS just wants a cut, not to stop it.
IRS isn’t in the business of stopping transactions (unless it’s money laundering) anyway
Agreed. Obviously, the tax code should be better enforced against wealthy people, but you can support one action without it meaning you don’t support another.
And as long as they ACTUALLY do both, then it doesn’t matter.
But they don’t.
So it does.
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On the other hand, if it’s worth your time to scalp tickets then you aren’t part of the upper class.
Edit: but I do agree, fuck scalpers
I’m not well-versed on the subject, but is ticket scalping not a large-scale business at this point? Like, yeah individual ticket holders can be opportunistic, but don’t bots buy tickets by the thousands as soon as they go on sale?
Most of those “businesses” are run by just one person, or maybe a few friends. And how much money do you really think they could be making?
With that logic, we can say scalpers are class traitors, then!
For real, most of the comments are about the scalpers but this is the only thing that stood out to me. The IRS has consistently shown they would rather net the little fish that can’t fight back than take down the whales. Another example of being beyond the law in this country if you have money.
Yeah, it’s cheaper than the big fish and the GOP has continuously underfunded the IRS. Their whole 2024 strategy is to make it look like the extra IRS agents from the Inflation Reduction Act are going after small folks instead of the big fish. Without those agents, lawyers, and staff the rich will always win with bigger guns.
Is it actually cheaper than the big fish though? You could have four people devote a full year to a single multi millionaire and you’d probably still net more than their annual pay. Hell even if you just matched it it’d be worth.
The little fish can’t afford a high priced lawyer. A big fish has several and can pay to keep the IRS busy fighting for years.
It is much cheaper. IIRC, the IRS went after Microsoft because they “sold” the Windows IP rights to a small CD/DVD printing factory in Mexico that MS used to print some installation discs, saving an absurd amount of money in taxes due to avoiding US taxes on the IP.
The IRS spent millions of dollars attempting to get MS to pay up. MS damaged the careers of the people in the government that gave the IRS the resources to go after MS, and cost the IRS an outrageous sum in legal fees.
Craziest part of it all: MS managed to get the laws the IRS was going after them on changed. Through political donations and lobbying, MS spent considerably more than the IRS was going after them for, to ensure the law was changed in MS’s favor.
I’m probably getting a lot of details wrong but there are news articles about it you can look up. The IRS hasn’t been given the resources to attempt any common sense obvious big wins since.
It’s super easy to implement, comply, and enforce this. Like almost automated levels of easy. It’s significantly more complex and requires tons of resources and expertise to go after the whales as you say. Resources they just don’t have. Resources that might be wasted if/when it turns out the taxpayer is fully compliant within reason.
It’s not about double standards, it’s purely logistics and resources - at least on the IRS side. Congress is responsible for their funding, or lack thereof, and it doesn’t take long to figure out who’s responsible for the lack of it. So I’d encourage you to focus your ire on the response political party, not the IRS itself.
Passing the buck in my opinion.
If you want to talk about political parties, each enable each other with their disgusting symbiotic relationship. The Democrats are just as responsible for being ineffectual and allowing the Republicans to enact their policies. They are responsible for losing to Trump in 2016. They are responsible for perpetually playing victim and pandering to voters like you, who are happy to be upset at just one side of the aisle, so they never have to actually be progressive or make any real changes that would upset their donors. It might feel good for you to vote for the lesser evil, but it does nothing; as evidenced by the last two decades. If voting actually changed anything, they would make it illegal.
Right, well, anyway, the IRS budget just got a huge increase under the Biden administration new budget. They’re finally hiring a ton of new agents and updating their ancient tech etc. The R party fought tooth and nail against this and there’s an active smear campaign to make the average person afraid they’re coming after you. R’s managed to reduce the budget increase which is going to reduce the IRS ability to go after the whales, as you were griping about in your original post.
I don’t see any evidence that they would target the whales given proper funding. Your argument hinges on that and it has no basis as far as I’ve seen.
The complex structures and tax issues present in large partnerships require a focused approach to best identify the highest risk issues and apply resources accordingly. In 2021, the IRS launched the first stage of its Large Partnership Compliance (LPC) program with examinations of some of the largest and most complex partnership returns in the filing population. The IRS is now expanding the LPC program to additional large partnerships…By the end of the month, the IRS will open examinations of 75 of the largest partnerships in the U.S. that represent a cross section of industries including hedge funds, real estate investment partnerships, publicly traded partnerships, large law firms and other industries. On average, these partnerships each have more than $10 billion in assets.
Believe me when I tell you a partnership with $10b assets is insane. Auditing that is extremely labor intensive and requires a ton of highly specialized skills and that all requires resources.
There’s really nothing left to argue here so please just take this at face value and move on.
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All that happened here is they lowered the reporting threshold to cast a wider net and force people to reported income they otherwise could have just not mentioned. It’s not quite like flipping a switch but it’s relatively easy to comply with, and relatively easy to enforce. “Fixing taxes” is significantly more complicated, to say the least.
Whataboutism
The IRS doesn’t care if you do crime or are exploitative or are morally bad
They just want their cut
Edit: grammar
The IRS will report a crime if they suspect one, but they don’t make the laws. You’re barking off the wrong tree if you think they should be the moral authority.
Edit: grammer
Edit2: grammar
You’re saying that if they suspect someone of profiting off of let’s say, human trafficking, they’d just ask for the taxes and not report the violation?
No, its still a crime to do a crime, but if you profit from your crime and dont report it, its now a double crime! All sarcasm asside, this is what the feds used to nab Al Capone. It also makes it easier for the feds to seize things that may or should have been owed. Remember, even the Joker pays his taxes.
Human trafficking is profoundly illegal, whereas scalping is not (in most states (all but 16)) so this makes your comment pretty silly. Not to mention the massive gap in how bad those two things are…
Human trafficking is most definitely “a crime” which is what some people think the IRS doesn’t care about.
Yes I did say it’s a crime… it is profoundly illegal… my exact words. According to the law, scalping is only “a crime” in 16 states. People can think whatever they want, I think it’s stupid and should be illegal worldwide, but that doesn’t matter. Gotta put your feelings aside when dealing with things like this, and jumping to extremes like you did is irrational and silly.
let’s make the threshold $60 instead of $600
Do you even know what the IRS is doing here? If an individual makes more than 600 in profit on anything they have to report it and pay taxes. If you lower that to 60 that would just be incredibly annoying for the majority of people to deal with on a daily basis
$6
anything more than the gas to deliver a ticket is a scam
I have to report a $1 profit if that’s what I got from selling market shares. $60 is way too generous.
I understand wanting to go after scalpers, but the $600 limit isn’t specifically for ticket reselling websites - it includes transactions not categorized under “Friends and Family” on places like PayPal as well.
I use various cashback websites who pay out via PayPal and I’m starting to get close to the limit. As soon as I cross it, I either have to give PayPal my SSN or have 24% withheld by the IRS.
If a friend accidentally sends me money via “Goods and Services” instead of “Friends and Family” on PayPal and puts me over the threshold, I’m the one in trouble.
people who resold tickets bad, ticketmaster who fixes prices good! win-win situation ?
Law enforcement exists to protect the status quo. Corporation profit good. Individual profit bad.
maybe they could go after ticketmaster’s near monopoly and constant breakage of agreements with gov. branches? just a thought
Why would the IRS be doing that
cause that would actually do good for the world
The IRS has zero jurisdiction to do that
Scalpers are predators, and captive markets like Ticketmaster give them a hunting ground.
By design. If it weren’t easy for scalpers and bots to scoop tickets in the first seconds they’re on sale, tours and venues wouldn’t be assured their sales are met. Then bot resellers start the actual sale, where the scalpers come in…you, the attendee likely getting sloppy 4ths.
Wait, someone paid more than $600 for a fucking concert?
Yes and often times way more than that. I checked prices for a Tool concert at a venue near me a few weeks ago and the section closest to the stage had tickets reselling for thousands of dollars. Obligatory fuck Ticketmaster…
Well as per article yes, but 600$ is the reporting limit. If Ticketmaster, stubhub and so on has a reseller account with sales income of more than 600$ per year, they have to file it to IRS. Whether its single sale or thousands of separate small sales doesn’t matter.
Completely normal tax procedure. Pretty much all big such platforms of various fields stock exchanges, commodity markets etc. have such obligation ledges on them for avoidance of tax evasion.
Nor as second note is anyone being “punished”. Punishing is what happens on breaking law. This is business taxes, you make profits selling stuff, income taxes start applying. Normal cost of doing business in society for the services society provides (national military keeps the Mongol horde from wrecking your business and so on, transport atluthority builds roads to run business trucks on so the music tour entourage can get to the arena, so one can sell tickets to that conce for profit and son on).
Yeah this is completely normal and not at all anything to flip out about. Honestly I’m surprised the reporting threshold was ever $20k to begin with. The 1099 reporting threshold for contractors has been $600 for over a decade now so I would’ve assumed the same for scalpers.
They could have sold multiple tickets
Ah good point, that makes more sense.
This was me a couple years ago but apparently scalpers resell tickets for THOUSANDS. My SO managed to snag a few for their MSRP which is reasonable but they sell out instantly and apparently there’s a market for them at those highly scalped prices. I don’t agree with it but 🤷♂️
I’m not gonna say that should be illegal, but, like, a thousand dollars feeds my family for nearly a year.
How are you surviving off of a dollar a day for food? Genuinely curious
I get by for 2 people on $50 per week in NJ near NYC by:
- Shopping at Aldi
- Going vegetarian unless eating out (rarely). Meat is very expensive, but many of my favorite produce is not much more expensive than before inflation started. We switched to egg whites from Costco instead of paying crazy prices for a dozen whole eggs.
- Learning how to cook healthy. Spinach, red onions, tomatoes, bagged legumes, whole wheat pasta are all dirt cheap
Oh sure $25 seems doable without any major losses. But $1 a day for extended periods for an entire family sounds really hard to sustain. But given their reply it seems they have a lot of other food sources they are considering free which makes those numbers make more sense.
Totally agree meat can be a luxury item although there can be good sales at times. And cooking instead of eating out is a massive money saver!
I produce a lot of my own and mainly buy things like sugar and salt. When you live a low income/low cost lifestyle you kind of get sticker shock with how much people shell out for things.
If I had to guess…he’s lying?
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So you didn’t like my reply about treating people with basic human decency, and this is how you behave? If this is a representative sample, I can see why you did time.
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You must be really really bored. Try reading a book, or watching a cloud, or doing something productive with your life.
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Scalpers are absolutely the worst.
I pay my taxes and you should, too. I have no sympathy in general for people not reporting income from PayPal etc, but I’m struggling to think of a less sympathetic subgroup of tax frauds than ticket scalpers. They’re not getting special treatment here, it’s any 1099 income via the payment apps, but I really wish that wasn’t the case. These crooks should be taxed out of business.
Punishment? Huh, didn’t know the tax man doesn’t want me to make money.
Do you even know what the IRS is doing here? They aren’t punishing anyone. This is them literally making sure people pay the proper taxes on the profit.
Did… did you read the title?..
The article is stupid and doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Literally anyone who sells anything over $600 must report the sale to the IRS and pay taxes.
modern problems, modern solutions
Wtf! People actually pay top $ for this? Fucking stupid 9-5s !! Just my 2 cent: 9-5 aka regulars are really important for the economy , without them the economy will crash but also 9-5s are not important because paying them living wage or paying them more can actually shift the balance of power.
Bro what
Lol the concept is really deep.
