Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Tax Time For Amway Ambots


Seeing as how someone from the IRS is searching for “Amway and federal tax” and reading the relevant posts on my blog about Amway tax cheaters and tax time is upon us I thought I’d revisit this whole get-a-tax-refund-if-you’re-in-Amway that is widely promoted by the Amway cult leaders.

This was the type of tax advice our Amway upline gave us that everything in Amway is a tax deduction and they consider Amway tax returns as part of an IBO income. What the upline really means is the only way an IBO can make money in Amway is to deduct Amway expenses from the income they earn in their real J.O.B and the only Amway income comes in the form of a tax refund. Our upline told us we’d get a big tax refund deducting all our Amway expenses legitimate or not.

At Amway meetings I attended the Platinum and pretty much everyone else in the room would be bragging how things couldn’t be better and their Amway business is growing. Then these same IBO’s claim they’re getting a large refund after filing their income taxes.

Ambot was fascinated. He had no idea the secret to getting a tax refund - according to our upline - was to become an Amway IBO. Free money from the government!

Refund? Ha, that’s a laugh when your business is doing good.

Ambots can not grasp this concept.

If your business makes too much money (income) and you don’t have enough deductions (expenses) you owe money at tax time. Yay! Business is going great!

If you do not make much money and your expenses are higher that your income then the government issues you a refund. Boo! Business is the shits!

In other words it is pretty much impossible for an IBO to claim business is going great and they’re making lots of money and then talk out of the other side of their mouth about how they’re getting a big tax refund. Or as ambots refer to it: tax return income for running an Amway business.

Most Amway IBO’s in addition to being fake business owners work a dreaded J.O.B. and are employed by a company and receive regular paychecks. When tax time comes around those sneaky Amway bastards deduct all their Amway expenses (XS, Perfect Water, vitamins, food bars, hotels, function tickets, meals, travel, etc) against their job’s income.

That is the only way most IBO’s make money in Amway. By declaring everything they spend on Amway as a business expense and deducting it off their job’s income.

Lying little ambot bastards that they are! Tax cheaters!

Here is a big clue ambots! Unless you own a grocery store, items that you eat (groceries!) or unless you own a cleaning service items you use for cleaning up around your house can not be deducted as business expenses in order to get a tax refund. When you’re an Amway IBO if you’re declaring travel and restaurant expenses on your taxes you better be showing some kind of Amway income profit on selling Amway products. If Uncle Sam catches up with you you’ll be up shit creek!

What about people who run a legitimate business that’s got nothing to do with Amway. Legitimate business owners have tax numbers, business licenses, insurance, and accounting software where all monies received from clients and all monies paid out in the course of running our business are entered. Legitimate business expenses that can be used as deductions. We back it all up on a CD and give it to our accountants at tax time. This is because we’re smart enough to hire the services of a professional who checks we entered everything correctly and aren’t missing information and ensures we are not leaving ourselves exposed and who also does their damnedest to make sure they write off as many expenses as they legitimately can so that we have less money to pay back to the government in what we owe in taxes.

Sure the hell beats “counselling with upline” and being told everything in Amway (XS, Perfect Water, vitamins, laundry soap, cleaning products, etc) is a legitimate business deduction!

For the record - our accountant disagreed with our Amway upline! Refused to handle anything Amway related. Accountants prefer to deal with legitimate businesses not pyramid schemes.

So much for “never question upline”!

If you are running a pretend Amway business and are taking your upline’s advice on filling out your taxes so that you can earn your money in Amway courtesy of a government tax refund check be prepared to end up in big shit in an audit.

When we were in Amway we were told if nothing else Amway is a good tax shelter. The taxman might disagree. Here is some more interesting reading:

IRS to Amway: The Party’s Over!


 

IRS answers for business or hobby and deductions. http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=169490,00.html

 

Peter Reilly’s blog post about Amway IBO’s in tax court aka selling soap as a hobby.


 


28 comments:

  1. I posted a link to this IRS position letter previously, but it's timely, so I'm posting again. It's too long to post the actual text in this comment.

    http://www.amquix.info/Amway_Taxes.html

    Can you deduct anything you want in Amway? Yes, of course, you can deduct anything you want. Will it pass an audit? Doubtful, and the penalties and interest are severe.

    The short answer is very few expenses in Amway are legitimately deductible. Personal consumption of products certainly isn't. Books, tapes, and rallies are considered social and motivational, not actual training, so they're out. Recruiting meeting expenses probably are deductible IF you have a prospect there. Since most attendees don't have any recruits present, most recruiting meetings are out. The meeting-after-the-meeting at Denny's is social and not deductible.

    Most Ambots do everything they can to hide their Amway affiliation. Their Schedule C will list the business as WWDB or "Ed's Business Consulting Services"; anything but Amway. When they get audited and the truth comes out, the agent is like a kid in a candy store.

    AnonTB

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  2. My personal favorite is the vacation-as-a-business-trip writeoff. An Ambot takes a vacation to family, spends 30 minutes trying to recruit or sell product to a relative, then writes off the entire cost of the trip.

    A two-minute search on Google will reveal what is legal to write off; it's hardly a mystery. A trip that is significantly personal cannot be written off, not even a percentage of the trip. For tax purposes, it is considered personal and non-deductible.

    Not that this is exclusive to Amway or MLMs. I know someone, a successful actual business owner, who took his family to Hawaii for five days, spent an hour visiting a customer. He knows he can't write off the entire trip, but thinks he can write off the $4000 plane fare for him and his co-owner wife and the first night's hotel expenses. He's in for a world of hurt if he gets audited. Like Ambots, he'd rather hide in the comfort of his fantasy beliefs rather than make the effort to learn the real facts.

    AnonTB

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AnonTB - ambots aren't the only ones who do the vacation write off thing. We go to Hawaii every year and hold our annual AGM sipping Mai Tais at the old Lahaina Luau! Ha ha just kidding but its been around forever as a tax deduction. And do you really think ambots can afford vacations? Or get permission from the assholes in their upline to go?

      Delete
  3. I love it when Amwayers brag about making money and getting a bigger tax refund at the same time because of Amway. They trap themselves that way because they don't think things through before yapping. LOL

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Lol. Check your brains at the door when you sign up with Amway.

      Delete
  4. I contract with Amway and my upline actually referred me to an accountant.

    This post is simply an assumption based on an extreme lack of knowledge, or just very selective knowledge about any and/or all inner workings of an Amway business or any other non-traditional business for that matter.

    Amway provides their IBOs with a business licence thus granting them government tax advantages of a home-based small business, similar to traditional. If the government thought that this was cheating the system, they wouldn’t grant these benefits to network marketers.

    So why does the government allow this? Because through extensive court cases, prosecutions, and lawsuits Amway has been tried, tested, and proven to be a legal, legitimate business model, not an illegal pyramid scheme like Anna suggests.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "This post is simply an assumption based on an extreme lack of knowledge, or just very selective knowledge about any and/or all inner workings of an Amway business or any other non-traditional business for that matter."
      -The infamous, "you don't know about it but we do" defense. So, by saying this, you claim that not a single person, not even Anna, was a member, or was engaged in a close relationship with an IBO?
      "Amway provides their IBOs with a business licence"
      -This is new on me. Is this the United States? So, what you are telling me is that, you file your taxes separate from your personal taxes? Do you claim Amway expenses against your earnings from your J.O.B.? As a licensed business, you shouldn't.

      Your upline referred you to an accountant, but if you went to a different one, would they be upset? Is this accountant also an IBO?

      "So why does the government allow this?"
      -Why do so many IBOs get audited, year in and out, as per the Reilly article?
      And again, 'it hasn't been prosecuted, therefore legal' fallacy.

      -Jerry

      Delete
    2. Amway providing ambots with a business license is a new one for me too. Ambots not too happy with anyone with different point of view than their beloved upline and are quick to dismiss other people's true experiences inside the cult. I bet after his upline referred him to an accountant they referred him to Dr Quack to treat some terminal illness!

      Delete
    3. Getting a real business license is not a bad idea. If I was an IBO, I would go one step further and form an LLC to protect my assets. That way, when my downline have to get their stomachs pumped from all that XS and vitamin crap, my 1974 Pinto is secure from legal judgement.

      Only sorta kidding,
      AnonTB

      Delete
    4. My line advised against getting a license, heavily. They used every excuse in the book as to why.
      -Jerry

      Delete
    5. Jerry - real business owners get business licenses. City hall probably doesn't issue to people who don't have the rest of their business operations papers in order and that would include scam MLMs.

      Delete
  5. I was listening to some Ambot show the plan. They said the same stuff Anna mentioned. Probably know most people in the scam are morons and fall for everything is tax deductible. If a person can pay 50 for communicate .....they'll believe anything.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Anonymous. Nothing ever changes in Amway except the lies of how much they make keep increasing. They're still showing the same bored plan I had to listen to 3 times a week.

      Delete
    2. The ibo was saying everything from gas,cell bill,meals,rent(claim its office), etc is tax deductible. Especially the system expense ....u can get every nickel back. Wait till they find out its all lies lol

      Delete
    3. Wait till Uncle Sam catches up. Special place in IRS hell for Amway ambots!

      Delete
  6. AnonymousMarch 12, 2014 at 2:29 PM, I'm sorry about your confusion in regards to Multi-Level-Marketing Scams. Of course they are legitimate sources of profit, however, there are no deductions. The business license provided to every Independent Business Owner is merely a membership to continue a close association with the company.

    In other words, you are just a member purchasing a temporary social card to be in affiliation with this specific group of people!

    Take it from me, I know someone whom earned $4,000 annually in Amway since 2008, and she's being audited by the IRS for reporting deductions in her annual filings every year up to nearly $6,000 since 2008.

    She does not know what to do right now. I look at her and wish I could help her, but there is no way to argue with Uncle Sam.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yup Uncle Sam is cracking down on ambots. Amway brings nothing but mysery to peoples lives.

      Delete
  7. Amway can be legal and still be a crappy opportunity for IBO's.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I'm so excited, the quarterly surge of Ambots is upon us! It is obviously close to conference time and they are on the internet looking for that fix of confidence before the next cheerleading seminar. It must have been a droll 3 months.
    -Jerry

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    Replies
    1. Jerry the ambots are hitting the Internet searching for tax advice on filing Amway purchases. And they all end up here! My advice - don't do it!

      Delete
    2. You'd think they would hide their collective heads in the sand with what is going on in their industry right now. It really isn't the best time to be part of a MLM.
      -Jerry

      Delete
    3. Jerry - ambots would disagree with you saying NOW is the time to get in blah blah blah.

      Delete
  9. See, this is the kinda-sorta half-truth that IBOs buy into, so they stop researching and learning and just buy into what their upline tells them.

    "Amway provides their IBOs with a business license"

    Amway cannot provide you with a business license. Only your local government can do that. An "Amway business license" is as legitimate as the toy sheriffs badge you bought your kids. It's irrelevant anyway. You don't need a business license to be an IBO. Your IBO activities at home are incidental to the business (calls, emails, etc). You won't be violating any residential zoning laws doing this, so you don't need a business license. Also irrelevant because you don't need a business license to deduct business expenses. Dude, you really need to educate yourself.

    "Amway has been … proven to be a legal … business model."

    Yup, it's legal. Nobody said it wasn't. And, as a legal business, an IBO is entitled to deduct *legitimate and legal* business expenses. The problem is, the courts and the IRS have already ruled that most deductions taken by IBOs are not legitimate and legal. Sure, there are *some* expenses that are legitimate, but not most. For example, if you drive to recruit someone, you can certainly write off the mileage. But even this is suspect in an audit. If you write off 50 business trips in a year and you only recruit two people, the burden of proof is on you that those trips were for business, because you won't have any business results to show for your efforts. So, even many legitimate expenses won't pass an audit.

    How do we know this? Because the proof is right here in the links in this posting. Real, legal court rulings and, in my link, an IRS document. Undeniable proof that this is all true.

    And yet, in spite of absolute proof, you still deny, deny, deny. You are an Ambot.

    "not an illegal pyramid scheme like Anna suggests."

    Again, not true. Amway is, for the moment, a legal pyramid scheme. It's immoral, not illegal.

    AnonTB

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    Replies
    1. AnonTB - good points. Ambots would disagree because they don't believe anything unless one of their cult leaders tells them its so. Brainwashed to believe lies and not to believe anything anyone who isn't in Amway says. Thats the life of an ambot.

      Delete
  10. Whether you own a business or not, if you get a refund, you're doing your taxes all wrong. You should NEVER allow the IRS to take from you, sit on your money, gain the interest, and then give some of it back to you at the end of the year. WTH kind of financial sense does that make?

    Instead, you pay less during the year, sit on THAT, let it gain interest for YOU, not the IRS, and then you pay what you owe at the end.

    If you get a refund, no matter your job, I highly suggest you rethink what you're doing. You're not "getting over" on the gov, the gov is getting over on you!

    ReplyDelete

Comments are moderated but we publish just about everything. Even brainwashed ambots who show up here to accuse us of not trying hard enough and that we are lazy, quitters, negative, unchristian dreamstealers. Like we haven’t heard that Amspeak abuse from the assholes in our upline!

If your comment didn’t get published it could be one of these reasons:
1. Is it the weekend? We don’t moderate comments on weekends. Maybe not every day during the week either. Patience.
2. Racist/bigoted comments? Take that shit somewhere else.
3. Naming names? Public figures like politicians and actors and people known in Amway are probably OK – the owners, Diamonds with CDs or who speak at functions, people in Amway’s publicity department who write press releases and blogs. Its humiliating for people to admit their association with Amway so respect their privacy if they’re not out there telling everyone about the love of their life.
4. Gossip that serves no purpose. There are other places to dish about what Diamonds are having affairs or guessing why they’re getting divorced. If you absolutely must share that here – don’t name names. I get too many nosy ambots searching for this. Lets not help them find this shit.
5. Posting something creepy anonymously and we can’t track your location because you’re on a mobile device or using hide my ass or some other proxy. I attracted an obsessed fan and one of my blog administrators attracted a cyberstalker. Lets keep it safe for everyone. Anonymous is OK. Creepy anonymous and hiding – go fuck yourselves!
6. Posting something that serves no purpose other than to cause fighting.
7. Posting bullshit Amway propaganda. We might publish that comment to make fun of you. Otherwise take your agenda somewhere else. Not interested.
8. Notice how this blog is written in English? That's our language so keep your comments in English too. If you leave a comment written in another language then we either have to use Google translate to put it into English so everyone can understand what you wrote or we can hit the Delete button. Guess which one is easier for us to do?
9. We suspect you're a troublemaking Amway asshole.
10. Your comment got caught in the spam filter. Gets checked occasionally. We’ll get to you eventually and approve it as long as it really isn’t spam.