I filed having received a tax 1099-K from
eBay for my sales. What a scam this new tax law is. This new tax law is specifically designed to extract the maximum revenue from untaxable dollars by burying those untaxable dollars in complex tax reporting procedures that the average "yard seller" on
eBay will never be able to navigate and thus, will be taxed at 100% of their sales, despite most of those funds should not be taxable because of cost basis of the sales.
Previously, tax reporting laws protected these yard sellers by keeping the reporting limits high enough that most of these sellers would never have to contend with tax reporting of their lower total sales. Business sellers with a high number of sales and high dollar amounts were always required to document and account for their sales and report them on their taxes. They already do this as a part of their normal business accounting. By lowering the reportable sales amount to a mere $600, this ensures most yard sellers now fall under the reportable category.
But to report your taxes accurately, you need to generate and file additional tax forms where you line-by-line account for every item sold, its cost and sales price to be able to get credit for any cost basis. Otherwise, absent these extra forms, the IRS will assess a 100% tax on all your sales. Yard sellers are not going to know or have records allowing them to file these additional forms or have business expenses they deduct to reduce tax burden. This means that once you enter the 1099-K data into your tax software, you will be assessed 100% tax on these sales. The IRS knows this, and this was the design of the law in its intent: to tax as many previously untaxed dollars as possible, regardless of if they should be taxed. The law has gone from an "assume you are exempt" for low-end sellers, to targetting them with a "prove you should not pay" philosophy. They are relying on the obscurity of the law and process complexity to force taxation of untaxable sales.
I think this is a result of our climbing national debt which is out of control and we will be seeing a lot more new legislation like this to extract more and more hidden tax dollars from the middle class. And if you think this is politically biased, I disagree. I think either party will do the same over the next few decades. Biden is doing so now with new proposed tax laws and Trump massively targeted the middle class for tax revenue and will do so again. They have no option, the debt demands it.
Advice: Chip sales should be either by check/money order or cash. Don't use paypal, etc or you will have to report the sales on your taxes and in order to not be taxed at 100% of the sale, account for everything sold individually. Oh, and by the way sales from "hobbys" according to the IRS are taxed at 100% now to try and close any loop holes, which technically, these sales of poker chips fall under, so the IRS will assess 100% tax on these sales anyway, if they were ever to audit any of these sales if you have cost-basis deducted them.