SL and the tax services

well this year is the first year i have to fill an income declaration, and i was wondering if someone could help me , under what type of income is SL?, how to pay as less as possible (i am in france i precise, so maybe not all the tricks apply from usa to france)

Your really going to have to speak with a local tax accountant to find out exactly what you are liable for. France probably has tax treaties with the US that will change what you need to deal with (most industrialised countries have tax treaties with each other)

Hi kyrah, i'm in france too and couldn't find a solution yet.
But i didn't win a single US$ from SL last year, so i still have 1 year to think about it.
If you find something please tell me.

As far as i know, there is nothing specific in the french law about this kind of business.

I'll send you an ingame IM (or send me one with your email ), so we try to find something together

Hi Kyrah,

I recently found myself asking similar questions for UK tax purposes, but unfortunately didn't get many answers here. However, I *did* find that the discussion forums at eBay UK were full of tax and business-registration questions from people who were making small self-employed incomes for the very first time... which was a very helpful starting point for me. You might want to try the french ebay forums to see if you find any clues there. Alternatively, a quick call to the french taxation service might work wonders... the UK Inland revenue were certainly a lot more helpful (and nicer!) than I expected!

One thing you might not have considered (I hadn't!) is you could also be liable for social security charges on your income. In the UK we call this National Insurance - and because I make an income from my activities in Second Life, I have to pay a small National Insurance contribution each week on top of the monies that are paid by my employer on my regular income. I believe that France has a similar "social charge" system?

It's best to get this kind of thing sorted out as soon as possible. In many countries, Paypal are bound by anti-money-laundering laws to report your income to the government once you've exceded a certain threshold. If you haven't got all your taxation and self-employment obligations sorted out by that point, you could be in serious trouble.

Best of luck!

Shep

Just to support the general trend - the rules vary from country to country, but your local tax officer should be able to help you.

Since I'm pretty sure in your case most of your income comes via L$ exchanged via LindeX, if they're not quite sure what to make of it tell them it's analagous to income through eBay if you take it out through PayPal. That might not be big in France yet, but I'm sure they've got some system in place for it.

I know that the tax laws in many places only count it as income once it's been processed into a currency they recognise and paid to you - which seems to suggest any money you use to cash and pay tier doesn't count! I have suggested this to my tax man and he said that seemed reasonable to him because he would have no way of checking such monies, although I suppose if you're Anshe's size he might be rather more interested than if it's a small amount each year that you'd claim back as business expenses anyway.