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Thanks for the tip Coke I really appreciate it. I better get some plan in place. greek39
I have heard somewhere that in order to be eligible for a tax exempt a Canadian has to work abroad for over 180 days out of a year. I may be wrong.
I am pretty sure that a Canadian has to claim his gambling affiliate commission earnings as regular income with all the consequences, no matter where the company that sent him cheques is originated.
For an affiliate it is sometimes like a guessing game – finding out which exactly affiliate company stands behind the payer’s requisites on the cheque he received. At the same time, for the authorities it would not be a problem to find out who is the payment sender and what the company’s business is about. So, unless you are hidden behind an offshore company, or have somebody cashing an affiliate cheque for you, it is not hard at all for the taxman to uncover the origins of your income.
With this increasing noise about online gambling, uneasiness of the whole situation with gambling affiliation in Canada and the US, I have seriously started to think about registering an offshore corporation. It is just one thing that makes me hesitant. To justify the future offshore expenses (~$1,000/ year) and the whole inconvenience of having your business headquarters thousands of miles away (even if is on paper only!), I need to have affiliate earnings of at least $10,000/year which I will not have at least for the nearest year or two (maybe will not have it ever?). The only question for me is: does it really worth it? I would like to know will my effort be paid fairly?… Nobody can answer it, only future will tell.
Unless I will be able to find one more use for an offshore enterprize.Well I do have a possible plan. I have dual citizenship, Greek and Canadian I also have an address in Athens. We are taxed to death in Canada, Greece is far better.
Not a bad idea, Greek39! I have never thought about it. I also have a dual citizenship. I should think about it. Thanks for the good idea!
I’m not sure about your advice BetPrize. Most affiliates receive their payments through Neteller, which acts like a clearing house of sorts. Neteller is located in Girbralter, so it’s safe to say that at the time your money is in that account it is offshore. How you repatriate your money is the key. If you bring it in through your personal bank account then it would show Neteller, which may or may not be coming from gambling. Most likely though if it is Neteller, though they do have a few other sites they work with outside of gambling, but not many. If you repatriate your money via the Neteller card, I’m not sure how well that can be tracked. In either case, if you are repatriating your money, you should be claiming it on taxes. There is that whole history lesson of how Al Capone got caught on tax evasion as opposed to the thousands of other things he was doing that were really bad.
Thanks for your reply Webber. When I was talking about relative transparency of gambling transactions I meant payments coming via cheques. I agree that by using Neteller you are more on the safe side.
My major concern was not about how easy it is for authorities to prove the origin of a certain payment, but about a possible persecution of gambling affiliate sites’ owners. Looks like the pressure “from above” is increasing. I would not wait till it is unbearably hot. I don’t have enough money to pay lawyers in case if I am taken to court, and I have a family to support. I just can not allow myself to risk it.
Online casinos are mostly offshore companies, they are beyond reach of the US and Canadian legal systems. It is us, affiliates who wouldl become the most vulnerable public if it comes to worse.
At the same time, I would feel very bad if I had to quit, to sell my sites and look for something else. I just recently started, but have already seen first encouraging results of my labor. I made all my sites (there will be 4 of them in total) from the scratch, spending all my spare time on the design, over a thousand of hours already. It is time that I stole from my family, from my kids. Should I call this a wasted effort just because of a bureaucratic fuss? I don’t think so! I will try my best to find the best way out- either by using my dual citizenship and virtually placing my sites and banking in my other country which allows any form of gambling, or by going offshore.
Regarding payments through Neteller, these days you can use it as well as Moneybookers, etc. So far. Who knows what will happen in a month or a year?… 4 years ago who would think that PayPal can stop accepting gambling money? Neteller is a midget comparing to PayPal (40 times smaller!), still there was enough pressure applied to make it unaccessible for gambling payments. Everything is possible in this world!
By the way it seems so hypocritical when Google, the PayPal’s parent company sells gambling websites by dozens, but PayPal itself wants to look so clean and sinless!
We will see how this ordeal with the proposed Internet gambling prohibition law will develop and end.
