Swedish Tax Office Targets Webcam Strippers 384
Sweden's tax authorities are cracking down on unreported webcam stripper income. They estimate that hundreds of Swedish women are dodging the law, resulting in a tax loss of about 40m Swedish kronor (£3.3m) annually. The search involves tax officials examining stripper websites, hours upon hours, for completely legitimate purposes. A slightly disheveled project leader said 200 Swedish strippers had been investigated so far, adding the total could be as much as 500. "They are young girls, we can see from the photos. We think that perhaps they are not well informed about the rules," he said.
Re:Hiring? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hiring? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, In this case, they're not looking for some kind of morality charged justice to be handed out, they're looking for tax revenue.
But it remains an Interesting point. You're basically asking "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" When those who are tasked to protect the weak exploit the weak, who will protect us from our protectors?
Re:Do they even know they need to report it?!? (Score:2, Interesting)
How many of you check your local tax laws before engaging in a money making activity?
In most countries, as well as the United States, if you are engaging in any legal 'money making activity' you have to claim the income on your taxes, for sufficient values of income. (If the activity is illegal, claming it on your taxes is among the least of your problems. :)
Of course, lots and lots of income often goes unreported because people either forget to claim it or deliberately don't claim it. Getting caught entails high penalties in many countries. OTOH, if you get paid in cash and neither party reports it ("under the table") getting caught is difficult at best.
Government goons hot on strippers tracks (Score:2, Interesting)
The line on this is so thin. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have a relationship with a girl and she takes her clothes off and you give her thousands of dollars a year, it's not taxable.
Even if you were in a multiple spouse household, it would still be true (multiple guys supporting her).
Without the "relationship" (one date? you don't have to be living together in the same house), it's taxable.
Re:Do they even know they need to report it?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. It is always A good idea to report all illegal income on the tax form. There is a special spot for it on the US tax forms, although I believe having a non-zero value for that line is is considered sufficient to issue an arrest/search warrant. (More on that later). Therefore The best course is to add it into the general income. I think that might technically be fraud, but the IRS would be very reluctant to prosecute any fraud that results in a greater amount of tax income.
Many organized criminals have been very well known, with the police being pretty darn certain about various crimes that have been committed, but lacking enough evidence to obtain warrants. It is often quite possible that with a search warrant They could find enough evidence, but they lack the evidence to get a search warrant, and are rarely ever confident that they would find enough evidence to convict if a search warrant was executed. The last thing they want to do is upset a organized criminal by executing a search warrant, but end up with insufficient evidence to arrest him/her. Often times by the time they have enough evidence for a particular crime, the statute of limitations has made it impossible to prosecute them for it. But if the crime resulted in unlawful income that was not reported on the tax forms, they can still charge them with tax fraud.
Little of that is probably news to those reading this post. But the important thing to remember is that quite a bit of that also applies to white collar crime. So the best course of action is to report any unlawful income, but not in the designated location, so as to avoid giving the police reason to obtain warrants. Not that I advocate having illegal income, but if you are going to do it, you might as well do it right.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
When you have an income tax, the government is everyone's pimp. The government can extract anything from its taxpayers with little recourse.
When the US started the income tax it was 1% on incomes over $250,000 (adjusted) We now tax everyone 20-30% of anyone making over $600. Furthermore, your "fair share" is determined on how productive in enterprising you are. The more you stimulate the economy, the more you're penalized for it.
I wish people in the US would realize that the more people in government there is, the exponentially more the burden on private enterprise. Assume 1 government worker in a population of 100 can pay 20% of their salary (say $1000) back. The remaining 80% of that salary comes from private enterprise. Now, imagine 99 government workers and one private enterprise person. We then have a $76,200 bill to be paid by one person. Good luck with that.
Today fully one half of Americans receive federal funding in some way. Good luck with that.
We have a federal debt of 12 Trillion dollars and a $1+ trillion deficit this year alone. Our taxes should be 60%. But our unborn have no representation in congress. I love those Obama girls. I can't wait to tap them - for their taxes!
Of course, it is the income tax that allows this. It is so easy to collect as as long as we can keep raising it, we'll keep demanding more and more. Good luck with that.
With a consumption tax this kind of spending would be impossible.
Re:Do they even know they need to report it?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ignorance of the law has never been an excuse for violating it.
I always hated this reasoning simply because it is usually said by people who study or write laws for a living.
The crux of the matter is that society often has too many laws that it impossible to know them all without consulting a lawyer who even then has paid legal assistants to look up the issue in question.
I can't find the quote right now, but there was a Roman senator who once said, if they made enough laws, they could simply arrest anyone for any reason at anytime.
In that regard a government could hold power over its people because the people did not know what laws they had broken when they were in jail. (Which is one of the reasons the US Constitution specifies that the accused to be allowed to face his accusers so to know why he has been arrested)
In that regard, if a corrupt government made enough laws, they could cherry pick any one of them to arrest someone whom they did not approve of while letting everyone else scott free simply because it would not be practical to arrest everyone who actually did break the law except this particular person who they did not like.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
Those hard-working people you love so much only have jobs because more business-savvy people are constructing environments in which their hard labor can be turned into something of value, and are directing the efforts of their employees toward appropriate goals.
Working hard is a very straight-forward proposition that doesn't require your labor to be *worth* anything. But as a result it doesn't guarantee that you will be creating any value - for yourself or others. You come across as a pure "means of production" communist. If you succeed in running your little experiment you will discover that everyone can be working their asses off and still producing jack-shit, if the people who are good at preventing that scenario are held back and the free market is tied up with taxes, regulations, protectionism and government-granted monopolies.
Your mistake is that you think labor is intrinsically worth something. It's not. Supply in an environment of demand is intrinsically worth something. Pure laborers are just one cog in the production of the supply.
Entrepreneurs set up the equation to actually produce value and - as a result - wages; and they do so at great risk to their own livelihood. Risks pure laborers are disinclined or outright unwilling to take. Middle managers, while easy to pick on, exist primarily because pure laborers are so unlikely to efficiently produce things of value if left unmanaged, so if you hate them so badly you have only your workers to blame. It's true that they aren't setting up the value environment like the true business leaders, but it's not true that they are unnecessary. They may well be overpaid, but it's not *your* money they are being paid with so you don't have any right to deny it to them.