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Did anyone else receive their 1099 from the Airheads yet? Is the amount correct?
I was busy running errands yesterday so never opened my mail until tonight.
IMPORTANT TAX DOCUMENT ENCLOSED from AirBnB Inc!
And it’s wrong. Shows “rents” in box 1 of the 1099-MISC and the amount is a little over 11 per cent of the amount shown on my earnings report for the year. I printed the earnings report to a PDF.
I’m too tired now to call and get some clueless Customer Disservice person on the SuperHost line. Tomorrow morning after a couple of cups of coffee, maybe.
At least they underreported to the IRS, not overreported. I’m just wondering how many thousand others got erroneous 1099s.
All the Customer Disservice airhead could do was “escalate it to San Francisco and someone will reach out to you”. She did admit that she was in a call center “not in the United States” but she spoke perfect American with no accent so I have idea where the call center is (Philippines? India?). Background sounds were more like a home so maybe support folks now work from home computers?
Any way, I have not idea how long it will take to “reach out”. I guess I’ll have to try Facebook now to see if I can get an answer that way. I have the Twitter link but I don’t post tweets under my own name, but don’t have the official FB page link. Can anyone tell me which FB link is helpful?
About one half of one percent of all tax returns are audited and most of those are at the extremes: claiming no income or very high income. Over the years I’ve seen people give an inordinate amount of worry to the topic of doing taxes.
My wife and I have been audited 3 times in 23 years. They were the automated audits where the IRS computer looks at what your employers said they paid you and compares that to how much you put on your tax return. Every time it was over a mistake made on a 1099-MISC. Every time it was because I reported less income on my taxes then the IRS had in their computers (to anecdotally confirm @Brandt’s point) and the difference was over $50K each time. Every mistake was made by the IRS during their data entry process due to small companies mailing paper 1099-MISC forms to the IRS.
I pulled ours yesterday, and ours is off by approximately 6k. Of course, the OCD finance nerd in me is determined to find it. I’ll report the higher (my records) but it’s bugging me all the same.
Did you have an actual full audit each time? Or did you just get the letter asking for a bit more information? I’ve gotten several of those (due to companies mis-filing W2s each time) but not a full audit, usually just one 1040 line item.
They were mail audits. They simply included their income records as evidence that we had underpaid on our taxes. They included a bill for taxes and penalties owed and a return envelope. They did not specifically request additional information, but they did include some vague instructions for disputing their data. I sent an explanation along with copies of my 1099-MISC forms and I circled the incorrect data from their records in the audit letter.
Each time, the IRS sent a letter a couple months later saying that the matter is closed.
Yeah, it sounds like a line audit, e.g. not a full audit of your return, which would be quite amazing that you’d had 3 full audits - lol, the unluckiest guy ever
Well, I got an email from Customer Disservice telling me the amount is for the sales and room tax passed through to me, supposedly why it’s a 1099-MISC rather than a 1099-K. I believe that they should have sent me a 1099-K for all they paid to me, rather than a 1099-MISC which shows the pass-through payments as “rents” which is NOT correct.
I asked the AirHead to elevate this issue to someone who 1) has the power and expertise to deal with the issue and 2) can quote to me the IRS code or rules that apply to this payment. Even though I had less than 200 transactions, I believe that the total over $20K and the fact that some of it was not income but passed through collected taxes requires a 1099-K.
I’m not hoping for much because it’s Air, and they don’t care about hosts as we all know. @Brian_R170 you apparently understand the tax code. What say you?
The IRS instructions for 1099-K say that both have to be true (over $20K and over 200 transactions), so you shouldn’t get a 1099-K from Airbnb. See page 5 here:
So, from what you’re describing, the 1099-MISC is actually telling you how much local tax Airbnb collected on behalf of your rental activity, but instead of remitting those taxes to your local government, they forwarded the taxes to you, then you remitted them to your local government. Airbnb is obviously accounting for the taxes separately from the payment processing money. I don’t know if they are required to keep them separate or if a 1099-MISC box 1 is the best or only way to report it. However, I would assume that you keep track of the taxes you remit to your local governments. So, other than a sanity check on deducting the correct amount of local taxes paid from your income, the 1099-MISC form is probably useless to you.
I’ll report the higher (my records) but it’s bugging me all the same.
Or did you just get the letter asking for a bit more information? I’ve gotten several of those (due to companies mis-filing W2s each time) but not a full audit, usually just one 1040 line item.