Stipend and tax issues - help me out?

Everybody,

Peter and I have gotten several bug reports over the weekend saying that the stipend and tax system isn't working properly.

I need some help to figure out what has changed. I have gone through the bug reports and looking back, the system seems to be giving the right amount of stipend. So maybe it's a problem in how it displays estimates?

Here's how I think the economy currently works. I know it's confusing and we're working on it, but this is what it should be doing now:

* New users get $3200 in cash.
* Making a box costs $10, completely refunded on deletion.
* Buying land costs $3/square meter, completely refunded on release.
* Once a week, on different days for different users, stipends are payed and taxes are assessed.
* Account history tells you when your last stipend/tax day was and when the next will be. Stipends and taxes happen at 1 AM Pacific Time on the given day.
* Base stipend is $1000 plus a bonus based on your leaderboard rating, both overall and in the last week.
* Taxes on land are $1/square meter, but may vary depending on where the land is located and how many neighbors you have.
* Taxes on objects are $1/object/week, more if it is a light and more if it is high off the ground.
* If stipend < taxes, you get the whole stipend. If your balance would go below $-1000, your balance becomes $-1000 by means of an "adjustment".
* If stipend > taxes, you first get at least enough of the stipend to cover the taxes. Then, if your balance is less than $3500, you get the remainder of your stipend up to a max balance of $3500.
* Estimated land, object and light taxes are updated once per night and displayed in account history.
* Estimated base and bonus stipends (after the $3500 cap adjustment) are updated once per night and displayed in account history.
* People who have vote stations on their property get a fraction of a "vote station pool" based on the number of unique clicks the vote station got that day.

Examples:
* I have $1000 in cash. My taxes are $1400. My estimated stipend is $1000 + bonus $500. Stipend $1500 > tax $1400. Thus I get enough to cover my taxes, $1400, plus the remaining $100 because my balance is under $3500. So I end up with $1100.
* I have $5000 in cash. My taxes and stipend are as above. $5000 is over the $3500 limit, I only get enough stipend to cover my taxes, or $1400. Thus my end balance is still $5000.
* I have $3000 in cash. My taxes are $2500. My stipend is $1000 + $500. Stipend $1500 < taxes $2500. I get the whole stipend, get charged the tax, and end up with $2000 in cash.

Is the tax date displayed wrong? Are the transactions not being displayed in the money detail pages?

James

I think this is where the confusion is happening. I can say with about 95% certainty that my stipend/taxes have never hit at the same time since i've been playing (not long). It's always on the right day, just varies with time.

1AM PST is prime playing hours for me, stipend/tax never seems to hit until I log in the next day.

Perhaps we need to check ntp synch of the different servers?

This is how it works, but it would be a lot less confusing especially to new people if everyone got taxed the same day. And it would help with ..... I have never gotten taxed etc. while online. If I am online at 1am then I don't get the notice til the next time I log in - and my money etc doesn't change til I next login. I think this is related to the problem where stipend days move. It will say my stipend day is Friday but I will log in at 3pm on a friday and no tax day. Then saterday I get taxed and it says my next tax day is next saterday. please look very closely at this to see if it is happening. My taxes generally don't jump the night before unless I go on a buying frenzy, however almost every week my stipend/bonus changes drastically from when I log off the night before to what I get on tax day. I just don't think all of this is getting updated every day or a more thorough or different method is used to calculate it on tax day than on other days.

Also, is there a limit to how many transactions show on the Sales/Gifts? My sheet for this never seems accurate. Can we get a similar window that shows how much we give away? (sneak that in there heh).

More predictatability is needed. Not knowing the behind the scenes workings my best guess is that there is some difference in how taxes or stipends are calculated on tax day then on every other day.

And now, Dave Zeeman's opinion. (2nd Edition)



We need live updating. I have no idea how databases and such work, but if there is any possible way to give us a button that says "update" on it, which we can push and see the current state of our monies, that would give people a much MUCH better understanding of their financial woes.



Same as before. We need a button to see up-to-date estimates. Infact, while we're at it, how about the same thing in our Sales/Gifts tab? PLEASE! I need live updates on all sections!



The SL population has grown, this pool must be raised. There are two very specific reasons why I don't even hold many events at my place (where my voting booth is).
1: The last time I did it, the booths broke the day I got sooo many votes, thus I lost a LOT of money. This was the avatar stacking event, which is not linden funded.
2: I notice whenever I do get money from my voting booth, it's almost a miniscule amount. So I basically gave up.

On another note, we need to give groups of people in communities incentive for having that community if and only if other players appreciate that community and do not wish to see it fall. Thus, we are in desperate need of GROUP voting booths! One booth that represents an entire community and would split up the money (either equally, or in a fashion decided by the group creator, really this could get detailed but let's save that for later) among the members of the group.

I seriously feel this would fix a lot of problems as far as the "do we want this in world or not" problem of SL goes.

Are any of these things possible/impossible? Please reply!

I would give my left arm to end up with 3500.

Why are they so high?

Taxes suck!

I will reply for many slightly newer users and say that when i read the taxes note card & talked with other people about taxes I came to understand that "the strippend will pay your taxes and bring you to a maximum of 3500".

It may be that until recently I didn't have enough stuff anywhere to have enough taxes to actualy affect this. I was working directly out of my pockets (with objects not money) and not leaving a lot out.

This perticular part (other than people runing into bugs) may just completely be misunderstanding of the tax system.

But I am sure (based on what I am hearing in other threads) that there are many that already DID understand exactly how taxes work and ran into issues that I have not.

Dave -- If you go through Prelude correctly, you'll get an extra $300, bringing you to $3500 to start.

Please please please please please. Please?

It is my understanding that vote booths are on their way out. Anyone else notice the people counter or whatever it is in the newbie area? In any case I don't think vote booths work right and don't think they should be expanded on. I was thinking of a group rating instead (either its own rating or as a composition of the behavior of all the group members or something) but I think there may be too many issues with that (that people can be in so many groups is one, that it probably doesn't really solve the problem is another ).

Is this (the "after the $3500 cap adjustment" bit) intentional? I'd really like a way of knowing what my pre-cap adjustment stipend+bonus is so I know how much stuff I can have in the world before I start losing money. As it is, I have to make a guess, wait a week, and see how much I lost. Even with live tax estimate updating it would be nice to know how much I'm covered without creating a hundred cubes to test the limits.

Another hand up from me saying that this doesn't seem to happen at the correct time.

And another hand up from me on this, too; please, let's have live or near-live updating of tax information.

Some very terse information is listed under Details explaining how much was collected for each category, but not why it was collected. I think it would be really useful, as I said before, to have a real transaction log, showing every dollar that was collected in taxes, given in stipend and bonus, given as gifts, and so on.

I know, it's extra data to collect and maintain, but if we (SL as a whole) are to achieve financial accountability we must have transaction logging. Personally I would be very happy if each day's transaction log were emailed to me then purged from SL's systems; that way, I can decide for myself whether I care to archive the history, and SL doesn't have to use up a lot of storage space to maintain old transaction logs.

Thanks Schwartz! =)

I don't know if the tax system is working right or not. This is the first time I've seen an explanation of how it is SUPPOSED to work (but I haven't looked very hard). I do see evidence that the accounting system has a few glitches, although it may just be lack of understanding on my part, or terms being used differently in SL than they are in RL. Two examples:

The last time the accounting summary popped up for me it indicated an outflow of $17,000 which I couldn't account for, but my total cash seemed about what I expected it to be, so I ignored the apparent anomaly. I also noticed that my "Net Worth" was a large negative number. Since I have a reasonable amount of land, and a cash balance far above zero, I can only conclude that I must owe someone a large sum of money. In real life, net worth is all your cash, plus all your assets (houses, cars, etc) minus your debts (such as what you still owe on your mortgage or car payments). This can in fact be a negative number, but unless the real estate market in your area has been hard hit, it is usually MORE than your bank account, not less.

Since I don't have a mortgage or car payment in SL I can't imagine how I could have a negative net worth.

I have heard some people speak of methods for "cheating" the tax system by transferring value between cash and objects (I didn't pay much attention to the details). If a large part of the SL experience is to be an "Online Monopoly" game, then these cheats will have to be tracked down and fixed.

I have a hard enough time keeping my greed in check in real life, I have no desire to let it get the best of me while online. If opting out of the "Monopoly" aspect of SL means that I am eventually rendered unable to do much other than chat, then so be it. I've kept my building activities in check in part to prepare for that situation. Like the economy in real life, the economy in SL is intended to control the use of resources without everyone having to resort to barter. Like the tax code in real life, the tax code in SL is in a way used to pay for "infrastructure" that everyone shares. Another, less fortunate comparison with real life tax codes is the goal of encouraging certain "good" behaviors. As in real life, it seems almost impossible to keep the "unintended consequences" from overwhelming the intended ones. I'd feel a lot better if the economy in SL was just used to control limited system resources and leave the reward and punishment for behavior to administrative people, elections, and goodwill in general, rather than trying to automate it. That would also serve to simplify the accounting significantly and reduce opportunities to cheat the system.

--------

Ooops, I ranted instead of answering your question...

But yes, I think there is something wrong, its just that the system is to complex for me to figure out what it is.

Simplifying the tax/economy system will reduce errors, reduce cheating and allow for better accountability.

Thanks to everybody for their feedback. It looks like there are several problems, especially:

* How we handle taxes being assessed and stipends given while people are online. I guess I need to be online at 1 AM more often!
* Display of up-to-date transaction information over aggregates.
* An overly complex design.

Hunter should be posting something to announcements soon about directions we're taking with the economy.

Thanks for your feedback,

James

Thanks for listening James!

The outflow is total spent creating objects and any other way to spend $L

I once spent over 250k in one week.. ^_^ glad I made back 251k

That is I created objects and gave out money totaling $250,000 and recived after deleting objects and payments $251,000. I bought and released a large portion of land in the same day plus I spent over 200,000 at Ama's Casino... It all adds up to your total in and out.

And James if you read this anymore the Gift details page needs serious work. It is WAY off for me, probably because of the large number of items that should be in there.