If you filed for PUA you better make sure you have been properly reporting your income on past and future tax returns

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I think the point is that governments at every level do whatever the H they want, as everybody ought to understand by now. And there will be a money scramble when this is all over, with the most egregious offenders likely to be state and local governments. As for the specifics of who does what to whom, we will just have to wait and see, but it is no time to jaywalk, speed, "overlook" income, etc.

I am never surprised at what goes on in Louisiana, the land of drive through cocktails that you can drink while driving your car. Things move at a very slow pace there with more of a run around than most states. I only use personal experience my daughter had while living there. Her car was "stolen" or possibly moved to another street by another govt agency while they had to cut a tree or fix a utility pole. After checking almost weekly for several months with the one tow yard for the city and told her car was not there , she suddenly received a bill from the tow yard for storage fees owed since only a few days after her car disappeared. They refused to give her a copy of the bill with the dates on it. She was able to get her car after several attempts when she found them closed during reg business hours. Then two years later she got stopped for driving a stolen car. The police said her car was registered as stolen with the DMV and she needed to correct their records. When she got there she was told, no it was registered as salvaged. Meanwhile she had been paying registration fees to that same department.
Don't get me wrong, she loved living there but the govt appears to be far from functional. This is just one story. She has many.

@sestrahelena wrote:

My mistake. 29 years!

[www.theadvocate.com]

I don't think anyone here really knows what they are talking about including me, about the taxes. Some of you are talking about regular unemployment that started in 1970. Yes taxes should be taken out state and federal, that is a question asked on the application. PUA is brand new, there are no past rules. Taxes are not being taken out, not in Massachusetts. I can't imagine PUA workers getting hit with taxes unknowingly.
My mistake I meant PUA, sorry. Pandemic Unemployment Assistance

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/15/2020 04:58PM by shopper8.

From further googling, I found that LA state was able to collect a lot of that money by non-renewal of driver's licenses, garnishing wages and taking state income tax refunds until people were paid up. I honestly believe though, that many of those problems were actually clerical errors within the DMV system that resulted in non-guilty people being charged fines. After all, it's a state that is proudly and boldly Infamous for its corruption.

@sestrahelena wrote:

My mistake. 29 years!

[www.theadvocate.com]

The fees are vehicle license fees or when an insurance company reports to the DMV you have allowed your insurance to lapse.
For Federal, there is a statue of limitations for 3 years from the date you filed your return for changes unless there is a case for fraud. Most states either have the same 3 year statue of limitations, some states have four years after the date you filed your tax return.

Sorry, I got on a corruption roll. But anyway my point is that if states can reach back 30 years to collect money they think is due to them (whether it is or not) then the federal government can probably do the same. We don't know who will be the president or the cronies running the show in 5, 10, 15 years and what their policy will be. Both the federal government and individual states have the same political system with voting, laws and courts. If a lower-level state can pass a law to do whatever they please so can the Federal government. Just saying, make sure that you can prove absolutely everything for the rest of your life!

OP, reminds me of my mother in law that lives in a 4 bedroom house with her husband only. Has a home office, but doesn't claim it because she uses her computer for personal reasons sometimes. She's had her own business for over 40 years and is scared sh****ess of the IRS. Overpays her quarterly taxes and everything.

Fact of the matter, the IRS hardly ever audits people and if they do it's a you forgot to include or these numbers don't match up with the forms audit.

Years ago I read about a guy who had his assets seized by the IRS. They raided his house and took everything but the paint on the walls. Took his toothbrush, toilet paper off the roller, everything.

They are definitely on the shortlist of people you don't want to cross.

@shopper8 wrote:

I don't think anyone here really knows what they are talking about including me, about the taxes. Some of you are talking about regular unemployment that started in 1970. Yes taxes should be taken out state and federal, that is a question asked on the application. UPA is brand new, there are no past rules. Taxes are not being taken out, not in Massachusetts. I can't imagine UPA workers getting hit with taxes unknowingly.

You completely threw me off calling it UPA. It's PUA...and it's administered by the unemployment department. That same one from the 70's, and there is precedent. They did this before with the stimulus payments after the crash in 2008, so it's not really a brand new idea (It was just a smaller amount of $50 every 2 weeks). Only the concept of allowing IC's into unemployment is new.

Each state has their own way to interpret and administer this, but it's all under the umbrella of unemployment, and treated, and taxed, as such. CA doesn't tax unemployment, so for me, it's just the federal tax owed. It may be different for people in another state....

The poster who said IRS can go back as far as they wish is 100% correct.

In general, there's a 7 year audit rule. The IRS MAY arbitrarily audit up to 7 years. They don't have to give a reason (but the most usual reason is someone turns you in for tax fraud; if fraud is discovered, the informant receives 10% of any back taxes recovered from the audit process). HOWEVER, if in auditing the 7 years returns, they find evidence of tax evasion or fraud, they CAN and MAY audit every single year the taxpayer has filed.

The 3 year rule another poster mentioned is for filing an amended return, and has nothing to do with audits.

SteveSoCal I corrected my response. I am beginning to be brain dead, I'm so tied of this horrible time we are in.
PUA.

HA HA. Too many acronyms in our lives...Too many passwords in our lives. After a while it takes a few moments to figure out what they each mean or are..sometimes you will never remember. I had a short confused period after working in Cardiology for years and moving to Neonatology in my career. (medical care for issues of newborns) I kept seeing a common acronym used in Cardiology in the charts of newborns needing special care. It was eye opening seeing so many newborns with this cardiac issue. Finally I asked someone and found that the acronym in the dept meant something completely different. A decade or so later they told us we could not use acronyms but...

@shopper8 wrote:

SteveSoCal I corrected my response. I am beginning to be brain dead, I'm so tied of this horrible time we are in.
PUA.

I got blindsided to a side track with the PUA UPA discussion above.
Aside from government depts with antiquated computer systems I do believe if they had the time and the interest the IRS could look into under reporting by gig economy people. You never know where their next area to clean up is going to be. For years tips for restaurant workers were way under reported. Once more and more people started using credit cards to pay and include the tips the amount of under reporting became much smaller. The MSC's also report income taxes and they report how much they have spent in fees to the IC's they hire. I do not know if it would be legal and whether they would do this but if they suspected there was a lot of under reporting in this industry they could ask MSC's for detail of payments to individual ssn's and then crosscheck to see whether these ssn's are reporting their income. I can imagine a future where this would be easy to do. But I do suspect we are far down the list of places to find fraud.

@sandyf; There's a system in place...the 1099-K, bust most shoppers won't hit the threshold to receive one. If you are a full-time E-bay seller you might get one, though.

They could simply lower the threshold of reporting for the 1099-K and then see shopper data. I think the IRS just has little interest in people making less than $100k.

I am not so sure. I did not get a full audit but there have been several times when I have been contacted by them and asked to prove this or that or told I still owe them an amt I did not owe them and then had to go thru the rigmarole of figuring out what they did wrong and then finding my back up info and calling or writing them. In all cases it was easily explained by me but it was a pain doing so. And that was always with earnings under 100K.
Yes lowering the 1099 minimum would probably be a faster way to do this. Lots more expense for the employers though.

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If you filed for PUA you better make sure you have been properly reporting your income on past and future tax returns

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