Читать книгу Casino Gambling For Dummies - Swain Scheps - Страница 121

For most recreational gamblers, there aren’t many ways to reduce taxes on winnings. If gambling is a hobby, which is true 99.9 percent of the time, then you can’t deduct any expenses — only your losses. Professional gamblers can deduct expenses, but a rigid list of requirements prevents all but a handful of diehards from qualifying as professional gamblers.

The only tax-reducing tool for recreational players is a log of gambling activity (see the next section for what you need to record). Because you can only deduct substantiated losses, you must be able to verify your losses in order to offset your wins.

Keeping a log may seem unnecessary for people who expect to show a net loss for the year. However, one of the appeals of gambling is that the unexpected can happen. For example, you take four trips a year to Vegas and play dollar slot machines. The first three trips are losers and leave you $2,200 in the hole. However, on the last hour of the last day of your last trip, you line up three diamonds and win $2,000.

In this scenario, the IRS assumes you won at least $2,000 for the year because they received notice of this $2,000 win from the casino in the W-2G form. If you can’t document those losses, you can’t offset the $2000 win and will have to pay income tax on it. You not only added insult to injury, you’ve possibly added insolvency as well.