help me cheat the govt and get paid under the table

i recently did a freelance job and originally quoted low telling the client this was my "under the table rate". job finishes and they tell me they won't pay me in cash "because it's illegal". obviously the whole thing is illegal, so that just sounds stupid. they offered to pay me a bit more to cover my taxes and report everything legally, so i called an accountant and found out the total rate for self employment taxes is 50%. 15% for self employment, 25% for federal and 10% state. so that would mean to get the full $4500 i'm asking for the job, i'd have to double my charges to $9000. obviously they weren't too stoked on that. now they're only offering me a personal check from the boss and no reporting on either side, or (get this shit) pay for shit for me like plane tickets and restaurants and gas and shit. it all sounds fucking shady.

can i get paid a personal check of that amount w/o getting flagged? what are some ways around this? get paid in smaller installments? getting it written to "cash" and taking it to a check cashing place?

am i just fucked? take the hit and never do work w/them again (not going to anyways, it was a fucking pain)?

i know none of you are accountants (maybe some are?) but just wondering if anyone has any experience with this kind of stuff?

you fucked yourself for trying to cheat.

i'e wondered a lot about the $5000 or so check, whether it would get flagged. i have nothing to help you with but am curious to know

i've deposited $10,000 cash before and nothing happened, but this could be different

i think you can get paid up to a certain amount without having to file, but that is an annual total, not one payment out of many you'll be getting over the year. maybe you will get away with not reporting it, but if you try to do things like this regularly, you will eventually get caught and face lots of penalities.

also fuck you pay taxes we all do you dick

seriously.

be tee dubs, not like it matters, but i'm a regular w/a fake name, obvs.

i do pay taxes. i have a normal job. i tried to do this freelance thing on the side and didn't want to deal w/getting an accountant, and doing "complicated" taxes for a shitty side job

poll

It's "Gob" btw

no shit dumbass. this thread was about a JOB

hilarious!

Self employment tax isn't 50%, that's crazy. It's more like 15%. So pay the $675 and get over it. Plus it's only double what you'd be paying in FICA anyway, so you're really only losing a few hundred bucks over what it would have been through your regular paycheck. You don't need an accountant and taxes aren't complicated if you're doing freelance. Just get turbotax or something and it's pretty damn simple. Buy yourself some work related toys, write them off and you can declare a business loss on that part of your income.

It seems kind of shitty to ask them not to report their side of things because that's a business expense for them. You're basically asking them not to take a deduction for those expenses. Pretty uncool if you're actually trying to freelance. But then you say that the whole thing is illegal so I don't really know what the situation is.

15% just for the self employment tax (as said upthread), but 50% total on the job. meaning i would have quoted way higher had they never agreed to pay me under the table.

and the not reporting on either end was their idea, not mine.

Now who's the dumbass?

Monday morning quarterbacking here, but both you and your client are kinda stuck here. Your client's accountant is probably wondering why there isn't a 1099 unless there was a previous contract agreed upon. And if there isn't one of those, then there's a greater potential of auditing on down the line. Anytime I'm looking at a job that's going to be > $1000 I insist upon a contract, a macro-level description of the project (the work I'm doing, and what I need from the client) and a macro-level schedule (rough timeline for my coding, rough timeline for their payment). It's kind of a pain to break it down like that, but once I got into the habit I've never been burned on money and clients take me way more seriously.

Story time: A person I work with now was doing IT contract work for awhile and didn't report some of his contract income. Several years passed. Early this year he got hit with a $38,000 IRS bill for back taxes + accumulated penalties. Fortunately, the IRS decided to only attach some of his current wages and not all of them.

Anyway, walterkranz OTM. Suck it up and report it.

xpost - kerm don't get so butthurt. dumbass is like a pet term around here

i guess big question is can a personal check go unnoticed?

i guess big question is can a personal check go unnoticed?

Certainly. It's the potential for auditing down the road that I would be worried about.

can a personal check said to have come from selling goods (does that have to be reported?) or a "gift"?

selling goods as in say i sold a piece of furniture on craigslist or whatever

That 25% federal and 10% state is what you would have paid on your normal W-2 anyway. It's not like you're paying extra because it's freelance, other than the 7.5% extra for the self employment tax. For freelance work you should obviously bill a lot more per hour than you get at your regular job.

But no, I can't imagine that the IRS is ever going to discover a $4500 personal check. It's not like they're looking into your bank account right? So take the free plane tickets or whatever and don't complain about it seeming "shady" when you're the one trying to evade your taxes!

I believe you may receive a one time gift up to $12000 or something around there but if there is any paper trail to imply you were working for them I'd think twice about trying to find loopholes. Just pay your taxes and learn to charge more next time.

i actually learned never to do freelance work again. it fucking sux it

The first time sucks but it gets better. Again, the proper way to cheat is to just invent enough "business expenses" that you can show a loss and pay no taxes on that 4500.

it wasn't the first time. i have a pretty decent job, didn't really "need" the money, just wanted a lil more creativity because i was really bored at work, but like most things that can go wrong, they did. the client sucked, it took way longer than expected, and of course when as soon as i started work on the freelance job, the regular job got busy

Since you don't really need it then, just have the dude pay walterkranz, jergs and me and you won't have to worry about any of it!

"consulting fee"

the proper way to cheat is to just invent enough "business expenses" that you can show a loss and pay no taxes on that 4500

this infuriates me 10000x more than getting paid under the table

Same end result though.

exactly

i find a lot of hope in the world when the majority of interneters are real anti cheating the govt out of taxes. surprised there are fewer people suggesting ways to not get caught

no one gives a fuck about stealing music though :-/

i was gonna make a comment about downloading lol

see, i see the shitty laws that allow completely bogus write-offs a much bigger deal than ol' black market type shit

serious q: how legit is it to write off the purchase of a new pair of glasses + eye exam?? i mean, my job did require the use of eyeballs

sorry if this is a dumb obvious question

that sounds totally legit. medical expenses and stuff

whenever ppl have this discussion around me i just think of this

REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

FIRST, I MUST SOLICIT YOUR STRICTEST CONFIDENCE IN THIS TRANSACTION. THIS IS BY VIRTUE OF ITS NATURE AS BEING UTTERLY CONFIDENTIAL AND 'TOP SECRET'. I AM SURE AND HAVE CONFIDENCE OF YOUR ABILITY AND RELIABILITY TO PROSECUTE A TRANSACTION OF THIS GREAT MAGNITUDE INVOLVING A PENDING TRANSACTION REQUIRING MAXIIMUM CONFIDENCE.

WE ARE TOP OFFICIAL OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CONTRACT REVIEW PANEL WHO ARE INTERESTED IN CASHING OF CHECKS IN OUR COUNTRY WITH FUNDS WHICH ARE PRESENTLY TRAPPED UNDER THE TABLE. IN ORDER TO COMMENCE THIS BUSINESS WE SOLICIT YOUR ASSISTANCE TO ENABLE US TRANSFER INTO YOUR ACCOUNT THE SAID TRAPPED FUNDS.

THE SOURCE OF THESE FUNDS IS AS FOLLOWS; WE RECENTLY DID A FREELANCE JOB AND ORIGINALLY QUOTED LOW. NOW THEY'RE ONLY OFFERING US A PERSONAL CHECK FROM THE BOSS AND NO REPORTING. WE DO NOT WANT TO GET FLAGGED OR AIRLINE TICKETS. HALP!

Hahaha, wait, so the central question of this thread was "someone let me know if I can get away with tax evasion?"

The 50% thing makes it sound like something people should feel pity about, but it's ... ok, you pay double payroll taxes for self-employment (the 15%), which, I know, is always painful -- but beyond that it's just the same normal taxes you'd pay for any job, so the "screw you for trying to evade it in the first place" response seems kinda fair.

(Depending on the rest of the year's income, though, the self-employment tax could be evaded by an accountant, I'd think -- by doing something like passing this off as "additional income" for an otherwise-employed person, or whatever. . . . I mean, maybe I've been doing it wrong, but I don't think I've filed anything as self-employed in any years where I didn't make a too-significant-to-fudge amount of outside-the-dayjob money.)

If you declare it as business income, and the company sends you (and the IRS) a 1099, you can then deduct a bunch of business expenses against it. Do you contribute to your healthcare benefits at your real job? Did you use a personal cell phone to communicate on the 1099 job? Did you use your home internet access for work on the 1099 job? A chunk of the self-employment tax is also deductible. So, no, in reality it won't be taxed at the rate you're quoting.

serious q: how legit is it to write off the purchase of a new pair of glasses + eye exam??

Check w/ an accountant, but the only time I've been able to do this legitimately was for safety glasses worn only on the job, the same with steel-toed boots.

(otherwise, glasses/exams get tossed into the medical deduction when you itemize - which has to be over, like, 10% of your gross to mean anything)