Hi everyone. I'm Rose Marie Miller here with Kelly Phillips Erb, a senior

writer here at Forbes here to tell us why the Tik-Toc advice to report your

ex to the IRS doesn't always add up.

Thank you so much for joining me today, Kelly.

Thank you for having me.

So, Kelly, what prompted your interest in investigating in debunking a Tik-Tok influencers claim about making money by reporting an ex to the IRS?

So I started getting a lot of pings on my feeds, people asking me, is it true that you can, you know, turn your ex-end to the IRS and get money? And I knew it had to come from somewhere so I did a little research and saw that

there was a clip of someone on Tik-Tok making that claim and there had been thousands of comments and millions of views.

So clearly people had a lot of interest in whether or not this was true.

And so that's kind of what's inspired the article.

And can you elaborate on the criteria set by the IRS for whistleblowers to qualify for rewards, especially in cases related

to tax evasion.

Right, so I think that people have this idea that you know somebody that cheated you can just turn them in right like

like you're mad at your X in this case why not flip them because there's a whistleblower

policy that really does exist with the IRS where you can actually get a piece of the tax that they collect.

But as you mentioned, there are criteria.

They're not looking to figure out you know the

hundred dollar deduction they claim that he wasn't entitled to they're looking for big

dollars so typically we're looking at incomes of at least for individual taxpayers of at least $200,000.

So we're setting the bar pretty high there.

And they're looking for fraud, they're basically looking for fraud in the millions, right? So you're looking at

at 200,000 as your threshold income and then the alleged, the alleged

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