Starting this month, third-party payment vendors will report $600 in total annual transitions to the IRS. That’s not every transaction of $600 or more. That’s if you do more than $600 worth of business with any of them over the course of an entire year.
Vendors will also need to see your tax information, comrades.
PayPal, Venmo, and others are acting in compliance with the American Rescue Plan Act, passed by Democrats on a strict party-line vote in both houses, and signed into law last year by Presidentish Joe Biden.
Are you feeling rescued yet?
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PayPal told users:
You may notice that in the coming months we will ask you for your tax information, like a social security number or tax ID, if you haven’t provided it to us already, in order to continue using your account to accept payments for the sale of goods and services transactions and to ensure there aren’t any issues when these changes take effect in 2022.
Affected most might be struggling families making a little on the side via Etsy and similar sites. Privacy advocates like Yours Truly aren’t too pleased, either, that once-convenient transaction vendors are now forced to stool for the guards.
Biden had promised not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000, but to be totally fair, he never said a damn thing about not using the IRS to stamp down on “deadbeats” who failed to report that commemorative spoon collection sold on eBay for $650.
Compliance costs, it’s easy to predict, will be passed right along to those very same users who might have some ‘splainin to do to the IRS.
You didn’t think Biden needed those 80,000 new IRS agents to cover a few hundred billionaires, did you?
Easy call: The “report $600” rule will be a minor boon to the cash and the underground economies — as always happens when big government gets snoopy about small, private matters.
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