Date: Sat, 6 MAY 1995 09:47:20 -0500 
From: Steve Kinzler <oracle-admin@cs.indiana.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.humor.oracle
Subject: Best of Usenet Oracularities #701-725 

Selected-By: "Alyce Wilson" <AMW108@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply.
Your question was:

> O eloquent Oracle, who can sing like Elvis, dance like Michael Jackson,
> and write like Chaucer (except much better than all of them), please
> tell me:
>
> How do you declare on your income tax forms all the offerings which
> your supplicants provide you as thanks for answering their questions?
> Your schedules of itemized deductions must be pages and pages long,
> too. Do you handle it all yourself, or do you saddle one of your poor
> High Priests with the mundane job?

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

} Ahhh, spring, when a young man's fancy turns to....taxes.
}
} No, I don't declare the gifts that I am given as income, it is more of
} a situation like a waitress gets - she's supposed to declare her tips
} as income, but nobody can actually prove how much she got.  If she gets
} audited, she can claim that she works in a restaraunt frequented by
} skinflints, which is why she only made, say, 8 bucks in tips that year.
}
} One thing that the Oracle has going for him is that the gifts owed are
} so rarely collected - I get a lot of "the check is in the e-mail" type
} of replies, rather than, say, the 12 cases of dragon repellant and the
} fair maiden that I am STILL owed from somewhere around Oracularity 560.
} Also, many of the gifts that I demand are not something that you could
} put an intrinsic value on, which also means it's not taxable.  Or at
} least not provable.
}
} The key, my friend, is to creatively name things.  Take, for instance,
} the 30 pounds of gold I got a few weeks back - I consider that to
} be, for tax purposes anyway, a heavy metal, for which I am providing
} storage and disposal. As there are many companies (waste managemant,
} for instance), who make a living taking heavy metals from people
} and disposing of them properly, I took this as a tax DEDUCTION,
} based on the quantity of this heavy metal.  Even though I did not
} actually CHARGE the supplicant for disposing of his gold, I donated
} the resources of the storage and disposal of said "hazardous waste",
} and wrote the donation off on my taxes.
}
} So, you see, with enough creativity you can write off just about
} anything.  You just need to know how to look at it.
}
} You owe the Oracle a cake with a file in it.