My boyfriend won 18,000?
my boyfriend won 18,000 but he didn’t have the taxes taken out. someone told him to collect lottery tickets up to the amount he won an they will write it off as losses. he won thisd money in febuary 2006. is there any other way or is this true. please help we have about 6,000 or a little more then that in tickets.
Did your boyfriend win this money in a contest or by gambling? If he won it in a contest (no cash wager was made), then he cannot deduct anything.
If he won it by gambling (lottery, slot machines, casino, a raffle, etc), then he can deduct other gambling losses, up until he has wiped out all of his winnings and if he has enough deductions to itemize.
He can collect his losing lottery tickets, as stated in previous answers, but that may not be as great as it sounds. 1st of all, he has to purchase all of those tickets. You can’t find them in the trash can and claim they were yours. You also need to include ALL of your winnings. That means that he still needs to keep track of all of his $1, $2, $5 winning tickets and include those as winnings (to be added to that $18,000). It is a bit of a grey area because it is very difficult to prove that you actually bought a lottery ticket and that you won or lost. However, if he shows $18,000 in losing lottery tickets and claims that he bought them all, the IRS is going to assume that if he bought that many tickets, he had to have some winnings. Most state lotteries have about a 67% payback rate (for every $1 that is played, the lottery pays out $.67 in winnings). If your boyfriend tries to claim $18,000 in lottery losses, he will need to prove that he bought $53,700 in tickets for the entire year (the burden of proof falls on you in this case).
If he won the $18,000 gambling, and he does play the lottery, then he should keep track of his tickets (both winners and losers). If he gambles at a casino, and he uses a players club card, then he should ask the casino for a statement of his winnings and losses (this is easy to do if he plays slot machines or video poker). He also needs to find enough expenses to be able to itemize his deductions ($5,150 if he files single, $7,350 head of household, since he is your boyfriend, I doubt he will file married).
Unless he gambles a lot, he will probably have to pay some taxes on his winnings. He needs to file the long 1040 (not 1040A, 1040EZ), and he would have to include this on line 21 as other income.
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