Brian Christopher has been taking advantage of Self Pay at casinos that offer it, like Yaamava’, for awhile now. It’s still relatively novel to many, and so we naturally get questions like this:
When Brian plays at a casino with jackpot self-pay (like Yaamava), and he puts in his code & transfers the jackpot amount over to his balance, how does the IRS/1099G paperwork catch up with him? I’ve been lucky enough to win 5 handpay jackpots in my gambling life (all on minimum bets, penny denom!), and, of course, I’ve gotten the IRS paperwork on the spot. He wins so many jackpots; I’m just curious how that paperwork catches up with him: does the casino issue the paperwork daily? weekly? other? Just curious….!
Karen T.
There are multiple types of these systems and so the exact specific can vary a bit, but in the case of Yaamava it goes something like this:
Each day Brian is going to play, he goes to the cashier first to activate Self Pay. Not doing this means he’ll get the standard paperwork for every jackpot handpay. For a filming day of 8-10 hours, that could be a lot of jackpots, and waiting for each payout vs. having the fast pay to move along more quickly.
Once activated, he’s able to enter his PIN to confirm the jackpot and the credits are automatically applied to his balance. The exception is jackpots above $10,000, which still goes through the manual process.
At the end of a gaming day, he goes back to the cashier to collect a single document, which rolls up all of his jackpots while fast pay was active that day, minus any of those super-sized wins above $10,000. If for some reason he forgets to stop by the cashier at the end of his session, he has the ability to go back the next visit and get the document.
So it’s helpful for players like Brian because it does reduce the total amount of paperwork when tax season comes. Instead of a document for every jackpot, he has one for the day for all his sub-$10,000 jackpots.
The limitation is that you have to do this each calendar day, but it’s a small amount of effort for what could be otherwise very time consuming, both for the staff on the casino floor and Brian when he’s playing, and then later for him and his accountant reporting all the wins on his taxes.
So indeed Brian can’t evade the reporting of the jackpots nor the paperwork – it’s just tidied up a bit given his situation.
Of course, not all casinos have this feature, and some don’t have it rolled out property wide (for instance, some only offer it in their high limit room). So in those cases Brian still goes through the traditional process like the rest of us.
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