Online Sellers to Face Stepped-Up Tax Collection
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Here's your money briefing for Monday, April 18th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Have you ever sold something on eBay or Etsy or gotten money through Venmo? If so, the IRS may expect you to pay taxes on it. But now it's gotten a lot easier for Uncle Sam to make sure that you do.
Congress was looking for revenue. And this is an area where everybody's always known that there's a lot of underreporting. Maybe $250 billion of unpaid individual income taxes a year.
Coming up, we'll check in with our tax reporter Laura Saunders about what this stepped-up effort by the IRS means for your tax record keeping and how it'll affect the business of selling goods online. That's after the break.
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It's tax day, and there's a new rule that could affect how you prepare your taxes next year and think about them this year. When you do transactions on sites like eBay or Etsy, you're generally supposed to pay tax on them, but until recently it's been hard for the IRS to track those kinds of sales. That's changed, and it's about to get a lot easier for them to make sure you're paying what you're supposed to.
What new IRS reporting rule for online sales is introduced at the start of the episode?
WSJ tax reporter Laura Saunders has been looking into this, and she joins me with more. Hey, Laura, thank you so much for being with us.
Thank you for having me.
So Laura, a lot of people have small side hustles that bring in a lot of money. Can you first walk us through what the IRS's rules were about this up until now?
For about a decade or so, the platforms didn't have to report the revenues of users, sellers, gig workers, and things like that, unless those revenues were more than $20,000 and more than 200 transactions. And that meant a lot of people didn't have IRS reporting. And now that's changed.
Okay, so take us through the changes the IRS is putting into effect.
Well, these changes are going to affect a lot of people that have less than $20,000 in sales. And what happens is that now the platforms will have to send 1099-K forms to the IRS reporting the revenue of sellers, resellers, and gig workers if it's more than $600. And the IRS will know what this revenue was. People don't necessarily have to report it on their taxes if they didn't owe tax, but the IRS will have a way to check up on sellers, resellers, and gig workers. Also important to note here that this change does not affect your 2021 taxes, the ones you've been working on recently. They affect 2022 taxes. And so there will be a blizzard of tax forms that goes out next January explaining what revenues people earned during 2022.
Ah, that's a good point.
This change doesn't affect people's tax returns that they've been working on this tax season. Why is the IRS making these changes?
Well, actually, it's not the IRS making this change. It's Congress. Congress was looking for revenue. And this is an area where everybody's always known that there's a lot of underreporting. Maybe $250 billion of unpaid individual income taxes a year.
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