So you're planning on not filing your taxes....

[PsYcHo-ScHnAuZeR]

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I'm eagerly awaiting someone on 2+2 to get bent over and raped by the IRS so we'll have a good thread to point people with your attitude towards.

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This has already happened in a prior year. I'll let him/her elaborate if they wish to.

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Someone needs to provide a link. I assume it's in the archives.

[Acesover8s]

I'm honestly not certain its been discussed in detail here on the forum, only alluded to. Granny knows who I'm talking about.

[DMBFan23]

I started in June, playing .10/.20. I made 300 dollars before the end of FY04. if the IRS wants to go to war over that, then F them. next year I'll have to report, as I've made some mad $ since then.

[bigalt]

I've been audited many times and have been found delinquent once (i had some capital gains that I failed to report), and never once has the IRS been any less than genial towards me.

They aren't going to come and put the smack down on some college kid for not paying 10,000 dollars worth of taxes. They are going to say,
"*ahem*, you didn't pay taxes on this 10,000 here."
You'll say,
"oops, it hadn't even crossed my mind that i had to pay taxes on that. i am/was just a silly college kid"
They'll say,
"yes well, you pay your back taxes now plus a penalty. don't let it happen again."

The only way it will go different is if you're some kind of crime lord that they need to drum up some charges on.

[PsYcHo-ScHnAuZeR]

A gambler's audit (but not someone who was cheating)

[groo]

Don't screw with the IRS. In the mid 80's I participated in a tax protest and didn't pay taxes or file returns for two years. When I started paying again, they came after me. I didn't go to jail, but it became a big headache. I was broke, and they still wanted their money. I reached an agreement witht hem to pay $25 a month until all the taxes were paid, of course the penalties and interest were about $60 a month so it was never going to get paid. After about 10 yrs I made an offer in compromise and paid it all off for about 25% of the then current debt. I also found out along the way that if I had filed and simply not paid those taxes I could have gotten rid of them via bankruptcy.

Long story short....If you don't mind the pain (which may or may not be substantial) don't pay, but be aware, there will be pain.

[David]

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I'm eagerly awaiting someone on 2+2 to get bent over and raped by the IRS so we'll have a good thread to point people with your attitude towards.

J

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Stop it jason! You'll make granny moist! [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img]

[2ndGoat]

<<I dont understand the I'm not paying attitude. I assume all these college kids if they were flipping burgers would be taxed at source, just cos you earn on the internet playing cards doesnt mean you are excempt from paying.>>

I have a theory about this. I was a freshman in college at the very hight of the napster craze, and of course had plenty of other filesharing options for the remainder of college. (I got just as much free s*** as the next guy, so don't think this is a holier-than-thou post.) I think it created a generation of small-time law evaders and a belief in a cicada-like survival system.

For those of you not familiar with cicadas, East Coast US (and I'm not sure where else) gets hit with a veritable pestilence of large, harmless insects every 17 years or so. They have virtually no means of defending themseves, but because of their sheer numbers, their species is in no danger of extinction from predators, and an individual cicada has a pretty good survival rate.

Now back to the college kids... with 2 gazllion (if you recall, the odds of Oakland winning the ncaa tournament) of us downloading files, it didn't really matter to most of us that 1000 were getting taken down in court. Besides, there were half-decent ways around getting discovered anyway.

Furthermore, a lot of my peers developed a personal justification of this behavior based on the belief that they only people they're hurting is a corrupt recording industry that charges $15 for a cd that costs 3 cents to produce etc etc (i'm well aware of the counter arguments to this, I'm just putting forth what a lot of my peers put forth as justification for their actions).

Now we get out of college and some of us have income that does not have taxes withheld. We see that only 1.5% of returns get audited, so must of us could slide by, and we still carry that feeling of disenfranchisement in a corrupt government. Not here to start a debate about whether government is corrupt, either, but you know lots of college kids see things like soft money and politicans that are too weak-willed to reform a social security system that figures to pay out nothing to us in its current form, and you get some unhappy kids.

So we end up with a similar attitude to the one we developed in using napster and friends. I very much didn't want to pay taxes this year but after having a substancial non-poker windfall at the end of 2004 I made the "right" decision.

Regardless, on a large scale, the training wheels are off, and the cat is out of the bag.

2nd

[mcozzy1]

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I'm eagerly awaiting someone on 2+2 to get bent over and raped by the IRS so we'll have a good thread to point people with your attitude towards.

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It's definitely going to happen again. The attitude some people take towards paying gambling winnings is mind-blowing. I had a relative who worked for the IRS for 30 years. "Rape" might be too kind of a word. Some agents will go easier on you than others, but that is the exception. Someone should start preparing a bunch of "see-I-told-you-so" links to posts on why you should report ALL gambling winnings.

[jacobsta]

Now I'm not a winning gambler, so this really doesn't apply to me, but doesn't it make the most sense to file but completely ignore gambling winnings and losses ? Far from being the "right thing to do" including your gambling winnings and losses seems like a sure way to increase your chance of getting audited - and what you should be reporting as your "wins" and "losses" is very much up for debate and a ruling in the IRS's favor. It seems to me that you should file normally, never itemize, and ignore gambling winnings and losses to minimize the chance of an audit, since even if you do report your gambling winnings you could very well end up owing in an IRS audit...