Originally Posted by
mtofell
The whole premise of that question is the person trying to avoid paying taxes on some of their income. Restaurants can't allocate you money you don't earn and make you pay taxes on it. Despite any actions by the restaurant, a person's daily log of income should be adequate proof for the IRS (this is the reason the IRS came up with the publication in the first place). To reiterate what I said earlier, these questions always arise when servers want to hide income when it's convenient, then claim some unfairness when something starts eating into their, "winnings" ("winnings" being money they had previously hidden).
How I came across that notion of the IRS taxing servers on presumed income is some news article decades ago (mid '90s IIRC) re: tipping (or lack of) by Europeans and Australians primarily: The servers didn't mind that much that the clients didn't tip because it wasn't standard practise in their countries, but were more concerned that they'd have to pay tax on this missing tip. I only filed U.S. taxes for a few years so certainly didn't get any from tips so not familiar with exact U.S. tax filing practices. .The story stuck (at least for me) but I don't remember where I read it. Could have been the WSJ or a S.F. Bay area newspaper..