A ~5k star project of mine brings in an average of maybe ~$15 of donations per year, so I suspect you’re already outperforming the median donation/star (or I’m way underperforming).
Be hilarious if the tax people in various countries started checking repos to see if people were reporting their donations as they assumed you guys make bank.
In the USA, any non-shady organization will send you a 1099-<some_code> report of how much income you generated. You're supposed to submit that form when you do your taxes, which is kind of dumb, because a copy of the 1099 was already sent to the IRS. USA tax filing is not efficient for reasons...
Heck, a buddy showed me a form letter the IRS sent him when he was first starting out and didn't make a whole lot of money (< $500 living at home). He had filed taxes and the IRS had sent him a letter telling him he really didn't need to file and please don't do it again until he had a higher income. He is doing much better now and keeps the letter as inspiration.
But what are those based on? Do you really need to reenter/recalculate them each year?
Countries like Estonia prefill the tax filing and they say somewhere above 90% of people don't need to make any changes when they file. Most people file within the first day and get their rebate within less than a week. If you had no significant changes (eg opened foreign bank accounts or sjmjlsr) you likely have no need to change anything. There's little fraud possible as data gathered is good and even less mistakes are possible. No one spends a day on their taxes and few need tla tax advisor for regular filing. This is increasingly common across at least Europe but sadly in few countries does it reach such sophistication yet.
You get forms from your financial institutions, jobs, and healthcare companies. Some of the forms aren't even available until after your taxes are due.
> You're supposed to submit that form when you do your taxes, which is kind of dumb, because a copy of the 1099 was already sent to the IRS.
Isn't that just an escape hatch if you do have additional income to report? The tax office should present it as such. Here, the tax office gets that kind of report from a bank. If I agree that it's correct, all I have to do is sign a prefilled form digitally. Unless I've generated income elsewhere, doing the taxes as an employer literally takes less than 5 minutes.
For US citizens, you have to provide social security number. Stripe may have some minimum requirement to generate a 1099 and report to the IRS, but that number is definitely less than $600 ($50/mo)
Just curious (clicked on your GitHub profile), why Singapore? Do you remote work/freelance? I'm thinking about moving to SE Asia and working remotely. It would be cool to hear other HN user's experiences :)
It's an interesting question (as far as tax can be interesting!), whether patreon and other contribution/donations systems count as gifts, or income from your work.
I'm sure the tax authorities would like argue it is income, if you're making $8K monthly on patreon (e.g. Dwarf fortress creators).
In the US gifts are tax free unless someone gives you a large gift. Last I checked it was $10,000, but I believe it is around $18,000 now. Obviously this is large enough that few people care.
Gifts are always tax free for the recipient unless both parties fill out some additional paperwork. The annual tax exemption is currently $14k but goes up every couple of years.
https://github.com/sponsors/Lemmih