Ticketmaster 1099-K reports gross amounts on a monthly basis. Do I enter the gross amount as proceeds, or the net amount I received? Do I allocate expenses per sale?

[grr8scot]

I talked to two CPAs thru TurboTax and neither had a clue on what to do or how to file it, even though they had 15-20 years experience each. The tickets are considered personal items so you do not get to deduct the losses, which sucks, but that is what I found out. The way I ended up entering at least I know the math was correct, only the profit was entered as a taxable amount which was the right way to do it but it certainly was not easy finding that route in turbo tax.

[rxmurray]

Did you end up finding out how much Ticketmaster charged the buyer of your tickets? I’m unable to file since my records don’t match what Ticketmaster reported. 

[grr8scot]

No, Ticketmaster was no help whatsoever. Even the two CPAs I spoke with through Turbotax were no help as they had no clue how to properly enter. I was finally able to file mine thanks to help from this community. I think I you can find how I filed by searching thru the thread as I posted several times. Good luck.

[Anonymous]

I have this same problem.  The different prompts are very confusing, even though I know how it is supposed to be reported.  This is particularly a problem with TicketMaster as they charge fees to both sides of a transaction and only show the sellers fees to the sellers and the buyers fees to the buyers.  I think the point is they don't want anyone to know how much they are making on the transaction.  Seems clear they should be required to report on the 1099-K all the associated fees and cost basis if they have it (which in most cases they do).  The information they are reporting is really insufficient--suggest writing your congressional representatives--that's about all they seem to respond to these days.

[Anonymous]

I was able to reconstruct my seller fees from emails on the successful sales of tickets.  As to the buyers fees, I can see the aggregate amount for a month from 1099-k by subtracting the sellers fees and the actual money sent to me by TicketMaster--but cannot determine how they actually allocated the aggregate monthly buyers fees to individual transactions.  Seems like the best approach is to allocate by sales amount (as I think that's generally how they charge), but you'd have to be careful on gain sales to make sure to show the right amount of profit.  The biggest difficulty is increasing the proceeds by the amount of the allocated buyers fees.

By the way, the IRS updated information on this issue:

See general Q/A 3 & 5:

https://www.irs.gov/pub/taxpros/fs-2023-06.pdf