After it was reported that an unnamed OnlyFans creator had claimed tax relief on breast enhancement surgery, the accountant who filed the return has said she was “surprised” to see it making headlines.
Rachel Martin runs a chartered certified practice with her husband James and says that, as her client list is not limited to content creators, she is not used to media attention.
OnlyFans is a subscription-based website where you pay a monthly fee to access content from creators. It is not exclusively a platform for adult content, but Rachel’s client is involved in that industry.
It was described as “the first known case of its kind” by the Mail on Sunday, but the BBC has spoken to another OnlyFans creator who claimed cosmetic dental work and breast implants successfully as a business expense in her HMRC tax returns, following surgery in 2020.
Those using the website do not qualify as employees, so are required to submit self-employed tax returns to HMRC and can therefore claim back business expenses.
Rachel tells the BBC this is an “exceptional case” and says coupled with “content creation being pretty new in the eyes of HMRC” it has been quite complicated to work on.
She says she used HMRC guidance for actors and other entertainers – which stipulates any business expense must be proven to have no personal benefit to be accepted.
An HMRC spokesperson told the BBC: “While guidance on the interpretation of tax legislation is available, we don’t provide assurances for specific cases.”
Despite some successful claims, HMRC added: “It’s very unlikely that a non-health related operation would be an allowable expense when calculating profits.”
But Rachel says she stuck to the guidelines around expensing items that would directly improve how much money her client could make.
“The criteria for this specific client was that improving her appearance would increase her income, which has since been evidenced,” Rachel says.
James added: “The thing people aren’t understanding with this type of breast augmentation, they think it’s a perfectly normal surgery but this wasn’t a normal operation, this has put them in a niche.”
Rebecca Goodwin, 29, has been an OnlyFans adult content creator for four years and tells the BBC she had breast enlargement surgery in 2020 to improve her income on the site.
“I wouldn’t have had a boob job if it wasn’t for doing this, I was feeling quite insecure and had to meet people’s beauty standards,” she says.
Rebecca, who is not a client of Rachel and James Martin, said her accountant “recognised instantly” the surgery she’d paid for could be classed as an expense when she filed her tax returns in 2021.
“That was the part that shocked me the most, that cosmetic surgery comes under this [as an expense],” she adds.
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Rebecca, who is a single mum with two young children, says before her surgery she made $12,000 (£9,800) a month but this jumped to $34,000 (£27,800) a month after debuting her new look.
She says it’s important that people don’t see this as an incentive “to get into the industry just to have cosmetic surgery”.
“I do think there should be guidelines, although I don’t think anyone would go to the extent of setting up a company just to get a boob job,” she adds.
But, she says entering the industry “has completely changed” her life and allowed her to set up affordable housing for people in her local community.
The Biden administration will move ahead with changes that could reduce federal payments to many private Medicare plans, but will phase them in more slowly than it had planned under an earlier proposal that drew huge pushback from the industry. The final payment policy for the private Medicare plans, known as Medicare Advantage, was released Friday and will take effect next year. Medicare officials said the changes are aimed at making sure payments are accurate, and that they chose to phase them in more gradually after getting feedback from the industry and others.
Billionaire venture capitalist Mark Cuban has founded or invested early in hundreds of startup companies over the years. But only one of them, founded in January 2022, bears his name. The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Co. seeks to disrupt the $365 billion U.S. prescription drug market, which is rife with pricing inefficiencies. For example, one tablet of the Type 2 diabetes treatment Metformin costs over $500 at retail prices. But through Cuban’s company, the same tablet is just $46.20. The company
Starting on Saturday, millions of people enrolled in Medicaid will have to re-enroll in the program or lose their healthcare coverage as a federal rule that protected them expires.
A thin silver lining of the pandemic in the US has been that more people have been insured than ever before. Early in the emergency, the federal government increased Medicaid contributions to states by 6.2% with a condition: Anyone who qualified for Medicaid coverage—be it due to loss of job or otherwise—had to be offered continuous enrollment, even if their circumstances changed, until the end of the quarter in which the emergency declaration was over.
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One thing is certain in the stock markets lately: their inherent uncertainty is taking charge, and high volatility is here to stay. For months, investors and economists have worried about the recessionary effects of the Federal Reserve’s anti-inflationary interest rate hikes – but the recent bank crisis has added another layer of concern to an already tumultuous situation. Now, we’re dealing with the fallout from that crisis, and inflation and interest rates both remain high. It’s a textbook cas
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The biggest cigarette company in the U.S. acknowledges that it has to move toward smokeless products. But to hold its shareholder base, it also knows it has to grow an already rich dividend.
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Check out the CDs that made our top 10 list based on their APY, minimum opening deposit, compounding frequency, and customer service.
The Dow Jones rose Friday after key inflation data, with the release of the PCE price index, the Fed's preferred measure of inflation.
Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, says the worst of the recent turmoil in banking is over, but there are still warning signs. "We're going from liquidity to capital, and from financial contagion to economic contagion," El-Erian said in an interview on Bloomberg Television in Cernobbio, Italy. El-Erian's opinions are his own. Follow Bloomberg for business news & analysis, up-to-the-minute market data, features, profiles and more: http://www.bloomberg.com Connect with us on… Twitter: https://twitter.com/business Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bloombergbusiness/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quicktake/?hl=en
The Charles Schwab Corporation (SCHW) closed the most recent trading day at $52.38, moving -0.17% from the previous trading session.
