Tax season sucks. Lots of us — and this includes me — need a little help getting our taxes done.
But be warned: You should be wary of where you get your advice. As Mashable's Elena Cavendar covered in detail, lots of folks use TikTok as a search engine. The results you might get about doing your taxes could be dangerous and dead wrong.
Keeper, a tax app aimed at gig and creator economy workers, published a detailed report on the myths and bad advice circulating on TaxTok ahead of tax season. Keeper parsed through hundreds of tax-related TikToks, spoke with tax experts, and compared those insights to anonymized 2022 purchase and write-off data from nearly 25,000 users of the app.
Using that insight, Keeper debunked some of the myths you might come across on TikTok. A big one? That people who rely on their appearance for work can write-off expenses for their appearance. Basically, no, an influencer cannot and should not claim that an expensive hair tool or fancy suit is a business expense. There have been a number of court cases that decided, basically, that if something for your appearance can be for personal use, as well as a business expense, then it can't be written off.
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Another myth spreading on TikTok, according to Keeper? That influencers can write off "lifestyle expenses" like...buying clothing hauls. The IRS has a pretty narrow definition of what counts as a necessary business expense for entertainers. These sorts of things viral because people always want to beat the system and people love hearing about loopholes. That doesn't mean those hacks are necessarily a good idea.
"People want to get rich quick and want there to be some secret formula that only rich people know about, when the truth is it's a secret formula designed for rich people, so you're already excluded," he said. "So the personal expense stuff takes off because it's basically saying, 'Your home is full of tax write-offs and you just didn’t know it,'" CPA Tim Owens told Keeper.
The New York Times wrote an in-depth piece on influencers navigating tax season. It's a tough world to navigate. For instance, gifts that brands sent to them should be taxed at market value but items they were paid to promote wouldn't be taxable.
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That leaves room for people to insert themselves as "experts" on taxes and, oftentimes, "experts" focused on helping influencers file their taxes. Like anything else online, it's a mix of genuine experts and people looking to cash in on a timely thing.
Look around TaxTok and you'll see lots of folks promising loopholes or luxury vehicles you can write-off. Oftentimes this advice is outright wrong or not exactly true. For instance, for those certain, heavy luxury vehicles: You can only write off the amount of usage that was actually for business. So let's hope all those folks taking their advice from TikTok have been tracking miles.
If you're looking for reliable tax advice and services, Mashable has reviewed and rated popular software for regular employees, small business owners, as well as freelancers, independent contractors, and gig workers.
For people online, it's important to navigate tax season with the aide of folks who know what they're doing. Think about all the hacks you've seen on TikTok that weren't hacks at all. Remember those air fryer recipes that turned out to be gross as hell? The lesson remains, there's bad advice about everything on TikTok — taxes included.
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