1y ago

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

gizmodo.com 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.

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.

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105 comments

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.
  
  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!
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-announces-sweeping-effort-to-restore-fairness-to-tax-system-with-inflation-reduction-act-funding-new-compliance-efforts
  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.
- 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.

105 comments