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Comment by rortian | Hacker News Reader

A bunch of uninformed whining is hardly in-depth. You'd think you couldn't file these electronically or that people have to create, gasp, invoices for the vast majority of such transactions.

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Cool so where do I send the 1099 for SAMs club, Office Depot, and the restaurant down the street to? Will you come deal with the reporting discrepancies for me. I'll be getting at least 1000 1099's a year, will you deal with those for me? This is needless bueracratic bullshit to the maximum.

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This is at least a full time job, probably two, and maybe three depending on how many of our clients get the reporting wrong. That's a cost of $100k - $300k each year just for the accountants. Let's not forget that some clients will misreport, so we will need to chase them down and deal with their accountants and lawyers.

And remember, if the numbers don't match you'll also need a tax lawyer, because you'll be getting audited. Off by more than 25%, have fun in prison. This is a major, onerous reporting process. If you have a $50/month service with 1000 clients, you're doing $600k. This will eat at leSt half of your gross.

I hate to break it to you, but a whole lot of people in the US don't have accountants and yet still spend more than $600 at various stores over the course of a year.

As the article notes, this doesn't apply to individuals, no matter how much money they spend at a store per year; it only applies to businesses, who are already required to keep track of their business expenses.

Individuals are small businesses too. Consultants, contractors, lots of people. More people, yes people, file a Schedule C than you might be aware of. Hell, someone who does a lot of business selling stuff on eBay or Craigslist is subject to this I they're reporting their income from that activity. Many do.

Sure, I file a Schedule C myself (for a pretty tiny side business). But I also keep track of all the expenses for that, since I have to to report on the Schedule C, so it's trivial for me to determine if I paid anyone more than $600 this year (just export my expenses from Gnucash, grouped by payee). And yes, it'd be an added hassle to file 1099s, and I don't really support it.

My main point is that, contrary to the impression some people here seem to have, non-business expenses won't require 1099s. The discussion here (in particular the thread I was replying to) seemed to think that the law would require their grandmother to send Best Buy a 1099 if she spent more than $600 on her new computer, or that you'd have to add up all your Home Depot receipts to see if you spent more than $600 on home-improvement this year, which isn't the case.

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