(I am not a CPA or tax attorney, nor am I who you want to talk to/bring with if you’re American and the IRS has requested an in-person meeting).

In general: receipts are good (self-employment income with no expenses is pretty much an instant red flag. Stage wear/lingerie/etc. is generally considered a deductible expense so long as it’s not something you’d wear to the store or whatever when not working. If you work from home, *portions* of your home rent or mortgage/internet bill/etc. may be deductible but pretty much only if you have a dedicated portion of your home that is *only* used for work. Vehicle expenses for people traveling *may* be usable but there’s some specifics you need for the vehicle in question and pretty much this only applies to road-trip or outcall.)

And yes, estimated taxes can be your friends, because otherwise unless you’ve been saving for the roughly 17-20% tax on gross income that self-employment starts out at you can be seeing a CHUNK in April. (Even if you can’t pay a dime, if you’re able to FILE you just can’t *pay* try to file on time. You’ll still be racking up income penalties, but the legal consequences are lessened and if you end up needing to set up a payment plan the IRS may well be more sympathetic.)

(It is quite possible that there are class conclusions to draw from this, though I am no expert.)

Here’s an estimate calculator to help you get an idea of how much you’ll owe as a freelancer: https://www.calcxml.com/calculators/self-employment-tax-calculator

Good luck everyone.

lol Want to bet on just how fast the government would legalize if they a) knew how much they didn’t get in revenue from this, and b) someone successfully used this as a defense against the IRS.

I’ll venture a guess that John Punter is not a tax attorney. Dude, I agree with your premise wholeheartedly – in theory. That said, a sex worker that’s not an employee, aka a self-employed sex worker, is asking for eventual IRS trouble if she doesn’t file and pay taxes. The only occasions she’d have to furnish the IRS with your “good argument” (based on – or analogical to – what actual legal premise?) is

1) when she files a tax return saying she earned $XXXXX that year but owes zero in taxes because [Punter reasons], whereupon the IRS will say “Great! Thanks for alerting us to the fact that you owe taxes because you got taxable income!” or
2) after the IRS sends her a notice of deficiency, whereupon the IRS will say “Great! Thanks for wasting the 60 days you had to give us an actual argument based on your factual circumstance and our legal standards for tax exemption, let us now assess what we suspected you owe and show you why we’re the country’s most powerful collections agency!”

Paying taxes sucks, but it shows you’re a grownup that can mentally connect concepts like mid-term financial planning, overall goal-setting, and fulfillment of civic duty with things like well-paved roads, public libraries, trash pickup, payback for any public education one might have benefitted from, unemployment/worker’s comp (for anyone you ever knew or cared about, as well as yourself), Medicaid (for those who live in expansionist Medicaid states), and such (paying for unjustified wars and domestic espionage notwithstanding – that is a valid argument but doesn’t negate all the other things taxes fund).

In short: don’t use Mister Punter’s Made for the USA teabagger reasoning to get out of paying taxes. There are alternatives to dodging your tax liability and trying to use this flimsy excuse to vindicate that decision, alternatives that are soundly grounded in the realities of being an income earner and a member of society, however marginal any or all of those could be. None of this is legal advice; but tweet @ me if you have questions or need more information.

I’m not a tax attorney, but I recently put in a few hundred hours as a student attorney representing taxpayers in collections before the IRS. I’ve also been programmed to uphold the pillars of civic duty (namely voting, serving jury duty, and obvs paying taxes) and I have to say, the IRS knows it can’t draw blood from a stone. Don’t try to act like a stone, is all.