egscomics patreon

Sales Tax 2: The Maybe Taxening

🕑 Added 2020-06-29 14:00:03 +0000 UTC

Comments

Esme

Update: I caught up for now, in a moderately irresponsible binge. Now to fall behind again.

Dan Shive

If I had to guess, they didn't manually set up their tiers as I did, or there's a difference that seems minor to us, but matters for tax code. In the case of the former, without setting things up manually, Patreon would have had to set up things automatically. It may or may not default to "gotta tax this". For the latter, exclusive Tier-locked images could be considered taxable, for example, whereas my polls are not in the majority of places.

Jesse Whyte

Also, I'm being charged tax as an addition to my listed pledge, rather than from it, which is illegal for GST. All prices must include tax here, and if they're charging GST than they're already admitting Australian sales tax applies to my pledge.

Jesse Whyte

My Patreon receipt just came in, so I can tell you I'm not being charged GST for some pledges, including to you, and I *am* being charged for others which are almost identical.

ijuinkun

In theory, all exchanges of money from one owner to another are taxable events. What is in question is whether the content provided through Patreon should be classified as "goods" or "services". For example, artwork that is permanently shown only to Patreon contributors and not released for free viewing could be considered "goods", whereas "sneak previews" where Patreon contributors get to see the artwork sooner than the general non-paying public could be considered "services".

Cley Faye

/me laugh in French, already paying VAT from the start :D

Some Ed

Getting taxed wasn't Patreon's idea. The idea wasn't about Patreon. It's just that it was worded broadly enough that Patreon's included. I'm pretty sure that this is all being rather vaguely worded right now because people are still scrambling to figure out what this all means for businesses like Patreon that were not in the directly intended scope and thus not really considered at all in the drafting of the rules. As I understand it, for Patreon, what it means is a lot of chaos, because I don't believe they had been tracking the details which are being used as the distinctions between what is taxable and not, so they've been having to go through all of the everything here to figure it out. They're doing this now rather than waiting for the IRS to explain it to them, because that's no fun for everybody, and the IRS would probably just say "tax everything."

Daryl Sawyer

I'm not sure about this "taxing patreon" thing. Sure, if someone's using pledges as a cover for sales (a subscription delivery service type deal), then that might need to be taxed. But for something like a comic (ie. the type of thing Patreon is designed for), that should already be being taxed as income, shouldn't it?