Washington Post published an intriguing piece on Friday entitled “The prostitute nudging sex workers to file their taxes” and it is everything you’d expect it to be based solely on the title. The Post interviewed a woman who goes by ‘Mia Lee,’ a former Wall Street forensic accountant and current professional girlfriend and CPA. If that name sounds familiar, we wrote about her back in November after she snagged herself a feature in Insider (or you have a side gig on OnlyFans because your firm is cheap with the salary and already follow her advice). We’ll save you a click and quote our article about her:
To Lee, banging dudes for money is preferable to her old job, the grueling pace of which drove her to depression. On leave from work in 2018, she realized that her job was destroying her so she left for good. At that point, she’d already experimented with some freelance “sugaring” (Google that if you want) after a coworker told her about how he was sugar daddy to women he met on Seeking Arrangement. She went full-time in 2019.
She says she’s billing guys at $1,500/hr, or rather a minimum of $3,000 for up to two hours of her time; 48 hours costs clients $20,000. She told Insider she expects to make $400,000 to $800,000 before taxes and expenses and taxes, after making $29,000 her first year as a full-time sex worker. Because of the “extremely high variance” in her main gig, she supplements with camming, stripping, and phone sex.
“My tagline is, ‘You can take the girl off Wall Street, but you can’t take the banker out of the whore,’ and it turns out that that plays really well into a lot of professional gentlemen’s dream-girl-from-the-office,” fantasies, Lee told Insider.
The Post piece is slightly less salacious and focuses on Mia’s work not as professional fellatrice but her efforts to spread good accounting practices to fellow hoes.
At a New York tax seminar at the start of last year’s tax season, Lee answered every query tactfully, with none of the laughing or leering that these women might face from another accountant. It helps that she is already familiar with the field: Questions covered such complex topics as how to deduct fees paid to rent a dungeon and how to report income paid in bitcoin from a platform called “Spankpay.”
Many women ask Lee about deductions. During the tax seminar, Lee used her own two-bedroom apartment as an example when explaining home office deductions. “I can’t write off my primary bathroom. I can write off my second bathroom because I stream my showers and charge for that,” she said. “Nice,” one of the sex workers said.
She has also helped sex workers determine gifts vs. payments. The IRS says a gift is:
Any transfer to an individual, either directly or indirectly, where full consideration (measured in money or money’s worth) is not received in return.
And:
The donor is generally responsible for paying the gift tax.
The Post offers an example:
The stripper told Lee that she was recently on a trip “and the guy got me diamonds.” They ultimately decided the gems were a gift with no expectation of services in return.
On her YouTube channel Money Talks with Mia, she provides sex workers “a wealth of knowledge about smart investing, personal finance management, and navigating the complexities of financial planning as a SW.” Like this one on navigating financial stigma:
Is #thotaudit still a thing?
Someone send them Mia’s way. But don’t bother with the OnlyFans creators who say they’re accountants, they’re lying.
The prostitute nudging sex workers to file their taxes [Washington Post]