If you let someone live in your home in exchange for some housekeeping, is it a taxable bartering exchange? If you don't normally rent the room at all? And don't normally pay a housekeeper?

Just curious as I have seen this arrangement offered on a housing board.

Think about it this way. In California, if you own a store or restaurant, you are not allowed to sell, or use the fruit and vegetables you grow on another parcel, like at home. Why.

At the border to California, they Tax incoming food to generate Revenue for the State. Since they can't tax or control food grown at home, they create a law to limit your freedom.

There is an IRS publication on this, it uses the example of mowing being swapped for legal services. Both have to report the fair market value of the services they provided. I would really question how often small transactions like this get reported though.

Could you reword this to get around the tax man, I don't know.

What if advertised a free room but state that everyone living in the house will be responsible for sharing the household burdens including housekeeping. Is that an exchange of services? I could argue it's simply cleaning up after yourself in part since you live there, not an exchange of services. I guess if the IRS wanted to pursue it we would have to let a judge decide.

Yeah but if you LIVE there, not come in daily as a job, hard to define the working hours if you just, I don't know, sit and watch TV? Seems a real grey area and hard to figure.

If someone in the govt or their helpers wants to mess with you bad enough, they will find a way or invent one to put you on trial or in jail.

1098B are supposed to be issued when you do barter transactions.

Now how many people actually issue them? I suspect very few even know about it. These are suppose to outline what fair market value of the product or service.

On the flip side, as I was pondering how someone who didn't receive money for their services is supposed to come up with money to pay the tax on their services, I thought well what about the fact that you can DEDUCT what you spend on supporting someone if you pay more than (is it 50%?) of their living expenses, regardless of whether or not you are related?