Quote:
Originally Posted by MTI
(Post 2750385)
. . . and now he may owe $10K in taxes for the stuff he got in trade.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/nyregion/fan-may-owe-taxes-for-claiming-jeters-3000th-hit.html?_r=1
...............In such gratitude begins tax liability, said Paul Caron, a tax professor at the University of Cincinnati law school and author of Tax Prof Blog.
He recalled a 2004 incident in which Oprah Winfrey gave 276 cars to the audience of her show, who were surprised to discover they incurred tax obligations of around $7,000.
“Pretty clearly he’s going to have to report as income the value of all the stuff he got for the ball,” Professor Caron said.
So break out your pencils.
On SportsMemorabilia.com, an auction site, baseballs signed by Jeter were being sold for up to $600, jerseys for close to $1,000 and bats for $900.
The tickets to the 32 remaining home games (after Sunday) have a combined face value of $44,800 to $73,600, according to the team’s Web site. The tickets could be worth a lot more if the Yankees play deep into October. Steven Bandini, a tax partner at the accounting firm Zapken & Loeb, said that if the items were valued modestly at $50,000, they would probably carry a tax burden of about $14,000.
Michael J. Graetz, a law professor at Columbia University who advised the I.R.S. on how to treat the McGwire ball, questioned whether the booty was not a gift, and therefore not taxable.
“The legal question of whether it is a gift or prize is whether the transferor is giving the property out of detached and disinterested generosity,” Professor Graetz said. “It’s hard for me, not being a Yankee fan, to think of the Yankees as being in the business of exercising generosity to others, but there’s a reasonable case to be made that these were given out of generosity.”
An I.R.S. spokesman, Grant Williams, said the agency would not speculate on Mr. Lopez’s tax liabilities.
