Lessons Learned from the Tax Court: An Olive Branch in Tax Court

When building your book of business, especially small business clients that do the heavy lifting due to their recurring complex tax filings, you might ponder seeking out clients in the video games industry. Salivating at the prospect of capturing just a tiny sliver of that nearly half-trillion market valuation as your social media feeds flood with news and memes from a random indie game you’ve never heard of, you wonder how to attract and retain game developer clients. But there’s several things that tax practitioners should know about how the games industry works, and its innumerable oddities, before diving head-first into taking on game developers as business or individual clients. Ready to press play?

Regardless of where you stand on the issue, student athletes have been able to tap into a new revenue stream since July 1st, 2021. This is when the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) began to allow students to profit from their name, image, and likeness (NIL). Which leads to new tax implications for a group of taxpayers who may have never filed a tax return before. As this has unfolded, it reminded me of taxpayers who were on the forefront of making money online. It was something new, so not many taxpayers or even tax practitioners knew how to handle it. It was real money, but was it really a business? I’ve loved seeing it evolve. Now, right off the back of COVID-19, we have student athletes who are able to take advantage of their online presence and also make money. But the income people were making 20 years ago online is pennies compared to what some students can make through NIL deals. In 6 short years, students have gone from not being able to profit monetarily from their likeness while competing as a student to now potentially making millions.