PayPal 24% tax hold

[BobC]

Originally Posted by hcv123

selling to or doing a private consignment (NOT an auction) with your local Net54 board member (ME ) who is in the business and handles all the taxes and other selling headaches!

Howard,

This is a serious question, and not trying to be funny or cause problems, but have you in the past, or do you in the future, plan on issuing 1099s to the people who consign things to you to sell on their behalf? (And maybe don't answer that directly here on a public forum either, and consider my post as food for thought.)

You mentioned handling the taxes and such for people who would consign through you, which makes it sound like they don't have to worry about those issues at all then. That would supposedly take care of the sales tax issue, since you would be the one actually doing the direct selling, and thus incurring the sales tax collection/remittance responsibility. But that doesn't automatically remove any income tax responsibility your consignors may still have. One big thing to keep in mind is that when you act as the consignee and sell things for others, if you sell on a platform or use some third-party service that then reports those sales to you on a 1099 form, you are technically receiving those reported payments on behalf of others, in a capacity that is known as being a "nominee". The IRS recognizes "nominees", and expects them to actually create and send out what they then refer to as "nominee' 1099s to properly report the sales that really belong to all your consignors.

I assume you charge a percentage or fixed cost as a consignment/sales fee to people that consign with you, and take that out of the proceeds of the consignment sales you make on their behalf. So then, you actually only incur taxable income to the extent of your consignment fees. So, what are you going to do on your own tax return when you sell something for say $1,000 that was originally consigned to you, and for which you charged the consignor say a 10% consignment fee. You really only have taxable income of $100 ($1,000 X 10%), but if you sold that item through say Ebay, and got paid via Paypal G&S, you are going to get a 1099-K at the end of the year showing you had $1,000 of taxable sales to report, but again, you really only have $100 taxable income for yourself. How are you going to report that $900 difference on your tax return that the IRS automatically assumes is your taxable income, based on the 1099-K you get?

Just so you know, in my described circumstance the IRS technically expects you to prepare and send out 1099-K forms to your consignors to then report the "nominee" sales you originally received on their behalf. If you fail to report that $1,000 on your own tax return as taxable income, the IRS will get a hold of you if you don't otherwise report enough sales/taxable income to cover what got reported to you on the 1099 form(s) you receive. And if you do report that full $1,000 as taxable income on your tax return, what do you then put down on your tax return so you don't end up paying income tax on the $900 that actually went to your consignor? That "nominee" payment you collected and then remitted to your consignor is supposed to then be reported by you, to them and the IRS, on a 1099-K form as well. If the IRS ever came questioning you, and found that you had not properly issued a 1009-K form to your consignor, they could legally deny you the $900 deduction you may have taken against the $1,000 of taxable sales reported to you originally on the Paypal/Ebay 1099-K form you received. The 'nominee" 1099-K form for $900 you should have issued to your consignor is the proof the IRS would look for to show that $900 is a valid deductible expense on your own tax return. In other words, they could possibly make you pay income tax (and maybe self-employment taxes as well) on the whole $1,000 you originally got if they caught you and found out you didn't properly report the consignor's share of the taxable sales income on a 1099.

This is not anything new in the tax laws, and has been around for decades. It is also a probable reason why many AHs don't accept Paypal, or use any other payment services/platforms, that would require them to send 1099-K forms to the AHs once sales hit $600 for the year. If the AHs don't receive any 1099s, the IRS won't be expecting, or looking, for them to be sending "nominee" 1099 forms to their consignors. I've talked and posted about this "nominee" 1099 reporting expectation/requirement elsewhere on the forum before. Hopefully this will help to educate others to at least be prepared for what this could entail and involve given the new, lowered 1099 reporting threshold requirements that officially took effect on 1/1/2023, unless the IRS decides to postpone them again for another year from now. LOL

And for those that don't like me, and/or don't think I know what I'm talking about (not talking about you Howard), here are a few links to back up and prove what I'm saying, including the third/last link which it to the official IRS website. Just cursor down to Section A. Who Must File, and the very first thing the IRS talks about is nominee income and reporting. And don't get all hyper because these links don't specifically mention 1099-K forms. The 1099-K form reporting requirements weren't passed until 2011, and with 1099-K forms only first issued starting in 2012. These other links are pretty much just based on the IRS site terminology, which was written long before 1099-K forms even existed. The IRS just didn't see a need to specifically go back and redo their terminology since it already covered and referred to ALL 1099s being received and issued.

http://www.taxproplus-la.com/29729/N...20the%20income.

https://www.calculatedmoves.com/nomi...-requirements/

https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i1099gi