vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
The purpose of the transfer determines the taxability. If this is happening to frequent, it is advisable to keep proper records of the transaction so that if there is an enquiry from Tax authorities you can explain. Unless you explain the why the transfer is being made, I have put out some broad categories.
"Gnucash is much more designed for accounting than for budgeting. While it does have some simple budgeting features, they're largely based around tracking how much has been spent in the Expense categories/accounts, and seeing how close one is to a limit that's been set. Because the point of Gnucash is accounting, there's not a way to track an expense in two expense categories simultaneously. (You can split a transaction across multiple categories, to have a grocery store purchase of $150 be split across $100 Food and $50 Phone Minutes or whatever. But not have a $150 purchase be tracked as $150 Food and $150 Household expenses, because that's not how double-entry accounting works.) The closest way to do what I think you're looking for is to take advantage of the hierarchical account structure, and repeat subcategories as needed. For example: This would allow you to see Household expenses vs. Vacation expenses, and still see what it got spent on. Reporting on all ""Food"" purchases, if you want to do so, is slightly more tricky as you'd need to select all those ""Food"" categories separately in your report, but it's possible. You speak about wanting to ""track"" expenses multiple ways, so I think that this would allow you to record data sufficient to ""track"" it. But the point of tracking any data is to be able to report on it in some fashion, so if you have more specific reporting requirements, you might want to ask about that as well."
Deliberately breaking transactions into smaller units to avoid reporting requirements is called structuring and may attract the attention of the IRS and/or law enforcement agencies.  I'm not sure what the specific laws are on structuring with respect to FBAR reporting requirements and/or electronic transfers (as opposed to cash transactions).  However, there's been substantial recent publicity about cases where people had their assets seized simply because federal agents suspected they were trying to avoid reporting requirements (even if there was no hard evidence of this).  It is safer not to risk it.  Don't try to structure your transactions to avoid the reporting requirements.
"The answer is just close your eyes and ignore it (in your words). I'm right there with you, the amount of detail that I track in my personal finances would be called obscene by some people.  But as you look at these features in any accounting application, you need to ask the question ""What does this information represent?"" In the case of your bank and credit card accounts, the reconciliation marker represents that you have received documentation from the issuing institution which you have verified against your accounts.  Marking them off confirms that you have reviewed the information, and that you checked for errors.   These markers exist on all transactions, whichever end of the splits you are looking at.  When reviewing the Expense side of the transaction, it might make less sense to see these reconciliation markers, because as you stated, nobody receives documentation related to their expenses.  However, if you itemized your expenses and kept a separate log of certain transactions (like a notebook where you track gasoline and/or mileage on your car), it might be useful to 'reconcile' your records once a month.  Checking off individual transactions, and verifying a new 'balance' in terms of gas consumed or miles driven, would allow you to identify any inconsistencies in your records. Not everyone would find such an activity useful, thus the reconciliation markers are present everywhere but required nowhere."
And directly from IRS notice 2014-21 FAQ: Q-1: How is virtual currency treated for federal tax purposes? A-1: For federal tax purposes, virtual currency is treated as property. General tax principles applicable to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual currency. Q-6: Does a taxpayer have gain or loss upon an exchange of virtual currency for other property? A-6: Yes. If the fair market value of property received in exchange for virtual currency exceeds the taxpayer’s adjusted basis of the virtual currency, the taxpayer has taxable gain. The taxpayer has a loss if the fair market value of the property received is less than the adjusted basis of the virtual currency.… Q-8: Does a taxpayer who “mines” virtual currency (for example, uses computer resources to validate Bitcoin transactions and maintain the public Bitcoin transaction ledger) realize gross income upon receipt of the virtual currency resulting from those activities? A-8: Yes, when a taxpayer successfully “mines” virtual currency, the fair market value of the virtual currency as of the date of receipt is includible in gross income. See Publication 525, Taxable and Nontaxable Income, for more information on taxable income.
I am no expert on the situation nor do I pretend to act like one, but, as a business owner, allow me to give you my personal opinion. Option 3 is closest to what you want. Why? Well: This way, you have both the record of everything that was done, and also IRS can see exactly what happened. Another suggestion would be to ask the GnuCash maintainers and community directly. You can have a chat with them on their IRC channel #gnucash, send them an email, maybe find the answer in the documentation or wiki. Popular software apps usually have both support people and a helpful community, so if the above method is in any way inconvenient for you, you can give this one a try. Hope this helps! Robert
"There is no ""standard"" way for personal accounting.  However, GNUCash default accounts set includes ""Expense: Adjustment"".  It is usually used by the community for reconciliation of unknown small money lost."
I've done my taxes using turbotax for years and they were not simple, Schedule C (self-employed), rental properties, ESPP, stock options, you name it. It's a lot of work and occasionally i did find bugs in TurboTax. ESPP were the biggest pain surprisingly. The hardest part is to get all the paperwork together and you'd have to do it when you hire an accountant anyway. That said this year i am using an accountant as i incorporated and it's a whole new area for me that i don't have time to research. Also in case of an audit i'd rather be represented by a pro. I think the chance of getting audited is smaller when a CPA prepares your return.
Scanned or electronic copies of invoices should be sufficient as long as they are accurate and you can deliver them during an audit. Also, if you have an accountant prepare your taxes you would either need to provide them a copy of the invoices or a summary of them with the corresponding amounts to be claimed. Personally I prefer to print out a paper copy and file that away with that quarter's and year's other tax documents. I do my own taxes and find paper copies handy as I can go through each invoice/receipt and make sure I have entered its information by ticking it. I find that when handling a large number of documents that paper copies are more easy to handle than electronic ones. In the end you will need to use a system that you feel comfortable with and are able to use effectively.
So isn't this a success? It was implemented by taxation teams to ensure that non taxable transactions could no longer occur, and now they aren't. On the corruption side, everything is electronic and traceable now. Sounds like it is working as intended.
In regards to your 1st question, if you are a US resident (according to IRS rules) and you have any foreign bank accounts, then you need to file a FBAR form for every year in which any of these accounts has more than $10,000. This is the way that IRS keeps track of substantial amounts of money kept by US residents in foreign accounts.
"I'm no accountant, but I think the way I'd want to approach this kind of thing in Gnucash would be to track it as an Asset, since it is. It sounds like your actual concern is that your tracked asset value isn't reflecting its current ""market"" value. Presumably because it's risky it's also illiquid, so you're not sure how much value it should have on your books. Your approach suggested here of having it as just as expense gives it a 0 value as an asset, but without tracking that there's something that you own. The two main approaches to tracking an investment in Gnucash are: Of course, both of these approaches do assume that you have some notion of your investment's ""current value"", which is what you're tracking. As the section on Estimating Valuation of the concepts guide says of valuing illiquid assets, ""There is no hard rule on this, and in fact different accountants may prefer to do this differently."" If you really think that the investment isn't worth anything at the moment, then I suppose you should track it at 0, but presumably you think it's worth something or you wouldn't have bought it, right? Even if it's just for your personal records, part of a regular (maybe annual?) review of your investments should include coming up with what you currently value that investment at (perhaps your best guess of what you could sell it for, assuming that you could find a willing buyer), and updating your records accordingly. Of course, if you need a valuation for a bank or for tax purposes or the like, they have more specific rules about how they are tracking what things are worth, but presumably you're trying to track your personal assets for your own reasons to get a handle on what you currently own. So, do that! Take the time to get a handle on the worth of what you currently own. And don't worry about getting the value wrong, just take your best guess, since you can always update it later when you learn new information about what your investment is worth."
Structuring, as noted in another answer, involves breaking up cash transactions to avoid the required reporting limits.   There are a couple of important things to note.   And, the biggest caveat - there have been many cases of perfectly legitimate transactions that have fallen foul of the reporting requirements.  One case springs to mind of a small business that routinely deposited the previous day's receipts as cash, and due to the size of the business, those deposits typically fell in the $9,000-$9,500 range.  This business ended up going through a lot of headaches and barely survived.  Some don't.   A single batch of transactions, if it is only 2 or 3 parts and they are separated by reasonable intervals, is not likely in and of itself to be suspicious.  However, any set of such transactions does run the risk of being flagged.   In your case, you also run afoul of the Know Your Customer rules, because it's not even you depositing the cash - it's your friend.  (Why can your friend not simply write you a check?  What is your friend doing with $5k of cash at a time?  How do you know he's not generating illegal income and using you to launder it for him?)  Were I your bank, you can be very certain I'd be reporting these transactions.  Just from this description, this seems questionable to me.   IRS seizes millions from law-abiding businesses
"These sort of issues in structuring your personal finances relative to expenses can get complicated quickly, as your example demonstrates.  I would recommend a solution that reduces duplication as much as possible- and depending on what information you're interested in tracking you could set it up in very different ways. One solution would be to create virtual sub accounts of your assets, and to record the source of money rather than the destination.  Thus, when you do an expense report, you can limit on the ""his"" or ""hers"" asset accounts, and see only the expenses which pertain to those accounts (likewise for liabilities/credit cards). If, on the other hand, you're more interested in a running sum of expenses- rather than create ""Me"" and ""Spouse"" accounts at every leaf of the expense tree, it would make much more sense to create top level accounts for Expenses:His:etc and Expenses:Hers:etc.  Using this model, you could create only the sub expense accounts that apply for each of your spending (with matching account structures for common accounts)."
I agree with mhoran_psprep's answer, but would like to add a few additional points to consider. TurboTax and the professional it will send to represent you in case of a tax audit have no more information about your tax return than what you entered into the program. Now, there are three (or four) different kinds of audits. The correspondence audit is the most common kind where IRS sends a letter requesting copies of documents supporting a deduction or tax credit that you have claimed. Representation is hardly necessary in this case. The office audit is more serious where you have to make an appointment and go to the local IRS office with paperwork that the examining agent needs to see physically, and to answer questions, etc. It would be better to be accompanied by a representative at these meetings. But, office audits are not as common as correspondence audits, and, because they are expensive for the IRS, usually occur when the IRS is fairly sure of recovering a substantial sum of money. If you have been cutting corners and pushing the envelope in taking large enough deductions to make it worthwhile for the IRS to go after you, you probably should not have been using TurboTax to file your income tax return but should have been using an accountant or tax preparer, who would be representing you in case of an audit. If the reason that you used TurboTax is that no accountant was willing to prepare a tax return with the deductions that you wished to claim, I doubt that having TurboTax's representative with you when you go to the IRS office will help you all that much. An example of a field audit is when the IRS agent comes to your home to see if you actually have a space set aside to use exclusively as your home office as you claimed you did etc. A Taxpayer Compliance Measurement Program (TCMP) audit is where the IRS randomly chooses returns for statistical checks that taxpayers are complying with the regulations. The taxpayer has to prove every line of the return. You claim to be filing as Married Filing Jointly? Bring in your marriage certificate. Submit birth certificates and Social Security cards of your dependent children. And so on.
I have used TurboTax successfully for a couple of years. In addition to things already mentioned, it has some forums where you can get some simple questions answered (with complex ones it's always better to consult the professional) and it can import some data from your salary provider if you're lucky (some companies are supported, some aren't) - then you save time on filling out W2s, and can allow you to track your donations with sister site ItsDeductible.com, compare data with last year, etc. Not sure how desktop software compares. So far I didn't see any downsides except for, of course, the fact that your information is available online. But in our times most companies offer online access to earnings statements, etc., anyway, and so far the weakest link for the financial information has proven to be retailers, not tax preparers.
"The short answer is ""it depends"", mainly on the type of record and how old it is. Most retained records should be organized by year first, then by type. Have a look at this: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/personal-finance/how-long-to-keep-financial-records.aspx Typically, you should do the following:"
TurboTax online works via Firefox (i.e. it is a cloud-based service.) I don't think any downloaded software is available directly for Linux.
You report each position separately. You do this on form 8949. 7 positions is nothing, it will take you 5 minutes. There's a tip on form 8949 that says this, though: For Part I (short term transactions):  Note. You may aggregate all short-term transactions reported on   Form(s) 1099-B showing basis was reported to the IRS and for which no   adjustments or codes are required. Enter the total directly on   Schedule D, line 1a; you are not required to report these transactions   on Form 8949 (see instructions). For Part II (long term transactions): Note. You may aggregate all long-term transactions reported on Form(s)   1099-B showing basis was reported to the IRS and for which no   adjustments or codes are required. Enter the total directly on   Schedule D, line 8a; you are not required to report these transactions   on Form 8949 (see instructions). If the 1099B in your case shows basis for each transaction as reported to the IRS - you're in luck, and don't have to type them all in separately.
I skimmed the answer from mirage007, and it looked correct if you're going to set this up from scratch.  Since you said you already have a system for tracking stocks, however, maybe you'd prefer to use that.  It should handle almost everything you need: Note that only the last of these actually ties the option and the underlying together in your accounting system.  Other than that case, the option behaves in your accounting system as if it were a stock. (It does not behave that way in the market, but you need to manage that risk profile outside of the double-entry accounting system.)
I see that at work too. People too ignorant to use Excel to store financial information so they hand you a sheet of paper with 20 ticker tape receipts from a ticker tape calculator showing how they added up numbers as support for a transaction...really? How much money is this costing the company on an annual basis?! Ticker tape fades, our soft documents are backed up off site nightly...  EDIT: There are a lot of jobs (private and public sector) that are simply obsolete but people cling to them anyway because of politics and general organizational-disorganization.
So there are a lot of people that get into trouble in your type of self employment situation.  This is what I do, and I use google drive so there are no cost for tools.  However, having an accounting system is better. Getting in trouble with the IRS really sucks bad.
I have used turbo tax for years.  Apart from the snafu in 2014, I have had no problem using deluxe, and I have lots of asset sales to report.  I prefer form mode anyway.  I can import the data from my broker, and I can e-file with no problem.  So the only thing I'm missing is the support. I can usually find answers to questions on the web, anyway.
"In 2014 the IRS announced that it published guidance in Notice 2014-21. In that notice, the answer to the first question describes the general tax treatment of virtual currency: For federal tax purposes, virtual currency is treated as property. General tax principles applicable to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual currency. As it's property like any other, capital gains if and when you sell are taxed. But there's nothing illegal or nefarious about it, and while you might get some odd questions if a large deposit ends up in your bank account, as long as you answer them there really isn't a problem. If you don't have documentation of how much you paid for it, if it's a trivial amount compared to what it's worth now you can just declare $0 as your basis. I would suggest you try to have documentation that you've held it at least one year so that it's a long-term capital gain, but you can just mark the purchase date as ""Various"" on your tax form. I've done this (for a much smaller amount of bitcoins, alas) and haven't run into any trouble. While there are some good reasons to sell slowly, as others are saying, I want to play devil's advocate for a minute and give you a reason to sell quickly: A decision to hold is equivalent to a decision to buy. That is, if a million dollars randomly ended up in your bank account for no reason, you probably wouldn't choose to go put it all into bitcoin, and then slowly sell it. Yet that's more-or-less an equivalent financial situation to holding on to the bitcoin and slowly selling it. While there are certainly tax advantages to selling over the course of many years, bitcoin is one of the most volatile commodities out there, and one has no idea what will happen over the next few weeks, let alone the next few years. It may go to tens of thousands of dollars a coin, or it may go to basically zero. If I had a million dollars in my pocket, bitcoin isn't how I'd choose to store it all. Just something to think about; obviously you need to make the best choice for you for yourself."
"This may be closed as not quite PF, but really ""startup"" as it's a business question.  In general, you should talk to a professional if you have this type of question, specifics like this regarding your tax code. I would expect that as a business, you will use a proper paper trail to show that money, say 1000 units of currency, came in and 900 went out. This is a service, no goods involved. The transaction nets you 100, and you track all of this. In the end you have the gross profit, and then business expenses. The gross amount, 1000, should not be the amount taxed, only the final profit."
"The IRS gets notified when you: (Note this is not a comprehensive list) As littadv mentioned, banks are required to send a CTR for any transactions over $10,000. They also are obligated to file a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) for transactions deemed ""suspicious"" by bank policy. These filings are primarily for law enforcement purposes. The IRS may or may not have access to this information. The IRS isn't all-seeing or all-knowing. But -- In the event of an audit, checks do provide a paper trail documenting the origins of your deposits. So if you fail to report income from an ""off the books"" job, or do not fully report self-employment income, deposit records could be used against you. You are particularly vulnerable to this if you are in a profession where ""off the books"" transactions are routine -- plumbers, auto repair, vending machines, etc. At the end of the day, give Caesar his due, and you'll have alot less to worry about."
- This is a simple solution because you don't have to monitor a person's trades over time, or even their frequency. Implementing this in the modern computer exchanges seems trivial to me. Asking an exchange to monitor each trader's trades to ensure no HFTs seems full of loopholes (ask a computer to execute HFTs across multiple trader IDs, for example), and I think is a distraction suggestion.  - The reason that I think these taxes don't get implented is, as ChaosMotor correctly states, these taxes empower the government, which is something that a lot of political players (republicans, libertarians, and anarchists) don't want. I have always wondered what would happen if these fees were imposed by the government, implemented by the exchanges, but all money went to, say, the American Red Cross. I think that that would be a pretty good idea.  - Finally, I also want to mention that the government plays a large role in markets already. For example, enforcing contracts, managing bankrupcties, and preventing fraud are all things that the government does to ensure that markets work well. This is another simple thing the the government can do to reduce market uncertainty and make our financial markets work better.