I've just been contacted by someone looking for an accountant, as HMRC has just contacted them after being informed they were potentially making an income on the side.
I asked what was their side business...."Only Fans"
The rules on self-employment say that you only need to tell HMRC that you are moonlighting if you are making more than £1,000 per year profit. To prevent their time being wasted by the small fry, rather like the rules on businesses who have to register for VAT. Isn't that still the case?
Hence, just having an Only Fans (content selling) account does not automatically mean its owner is breaking any tax rules. Although, given that the transactions are all recorded on the website it would be easy to prove that someone has earned enough money (in addition to their day job) to breach the personal allowance threshold and owe income tax on their earnings. The same cannot be said for many other sex-industry websites though, where it's all cash-in-hand upon meeting! LOL
I'm involved in the car scene (shows meets etc) and loads of "car girls" decided to become prostitutes via OF. Several of them are moaning thst HMRC are 'on their backs'
" car girls in this instance meaning getting mum and dad to finance a high end car and then pretend 'living best life through hardwork'. Essentially bumper bunnies who wanted more attention.
Surely, people selling content on OF are basically just self-employed strippers not prostitutes?
When I was a student I had a close friend whose girlfriend (also a student) was an escort. She did it all through a website not an agency. He wanted her to stop as he worried about her safety, but he didn't feel like he had the right to ask her to because she could earn £600 just for an over-nighter with one of her regular bored middle-aged businessmen clients. (Obviously, that was a very useful amount of money for little of her time/effort so it would have been a sacrifice for her to give it up.)
However, I do wonder if having her name and address reported to HMRC by that website's owners (if it was a statutory duty to do so) might have been a problem for her in later life. I mean if she becomes a school teacher, nurse, social worker, civil servant, (let alone a Policewoman/CPS employee/solicitor) many years later; being known by a government department to have worked as an escort, even for a brief period, at one point in her life might be problematic?
If someone is earning their money legally and paying income tax on their earnings above the personal allowance threshold and there is no "reasonable suspicion" that they are doing otherwise then I don't see how it's HMRC's business what exactly they are doing as their side hustle. I mean no one who moonlights as a self-employed stripper (OF) or an escort is going to say that's their second occupation on their self-assessment tax return! They're going to put "dancer", "model", "entertainer" or something similar down.
