An Old Profession That's New to Doing Taxes

By COREY KILGANNON

At 22, Sarah Patterson has already spent several years in the working world, but she has yet to report her income to the government.

For one thing, Ms. Patterson, of Manhattan, works in a cash business, with no withholding tax. But she is also worried about how to list her profession on a 1040 form — she is a foot fetish model.

"What I do is not commonly considered work," explained Ms. Patterson, who said she earns more than $100 an hour for letting men ogle or stroke her shapely feet. "When they ask for your occupation, I can't imagine there would be a little box to check describing my job." She can take home up to $400 for working a foot-fetish party where clients take turns enjoying her feet, she said. Private sessions can be even more lucrative.

She told all this to a screener last Thursday night at an unusual tax workshop held at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center on West 13th Street. As at other tax workshops being held these days leading up to the mid-April filing deadline, there were workers on hand to explain things like the earned-income-tax credit. And yes, there were computers providing information about children as deductions.

But hanging on the wall was pornographic art, including a collage with the words: Hustling IS work. Tip Well."

The event was organized by a group called Prostitutes of New York, a support and advocacy group, and by a sex industry magazine called Spread. Prostitutes of New York advocates the legalization of prostitution and meets clandestinely to avoid the police and pimps.

Members of the group helped Ms. Patterson and other sex workers — including pornography actors, strippers, nude models, peep show performers, phone sex workers and madams — who want to begin filing tax returns.

Like many sex workers, Ms. Patterson said she no longer wants to be considered a tax evader. She wants to be a legitimate taxpayer and to begin paying into Social Security and build a good credit history.

But how to list her various revenue streams? Ms. Patterson is self-employed — getting her own private clients through word of mouth — but also receives regular payment when booking a foot massage session through her booking agency, the Foot Worship Palace, a Manhattan company that employs fetish models. On top of that, she is an English tutor for immigrants.

A screener told her that she could get free help from one of several tax preparation centers in the city and introduced her to representatives from Citizens for N.Y.C., which, using a grant from the Robin Hood Foundation, finances 40 local advocacy groups, including Prostitutes of New York, to offer tax help to marginalized workers who might not otherwise file, including street vendors, dishwashers and illegal immigrants who work at hotel, restaurant and cleaning jobs.

A spokesman for the Internal Revenue Service said that it had a number of civil and criminal tax compliance programs in place to detect and deal with noncompliance by people who receive income in cash.

Jane Vincent, 23, of Queens, another foot-fetish model, said the workshop would "do a lot to remove some of the shame and illegitimate nature of the industry."

One screener, a 26-year-old woman from Manhattan, said she worked as a prostitute under the name Eve Ryder. She said she had kept strict track of her earnings and listed them on an Excel spreadsheet and on tax forms she sent to the I.R.S. "I just write down that I'm self-employed and leave it at that," she said. "The form doesn't ask and I don't tell. Just because I work as a prostitute, I still want to be a taxpaying member of society."

She said most of the working-girl clichés — either the glamorized glitz of the high-priced call girl or the depraved danger of the strung-out street walker — applied to only a minority of prostitutes.

"Most of them are supporting children or paying rent and college loans, things like that," she said.

The tax outreach program "helps sex workers who don't know they can and should file taxes," said Audacia Ray, 26, of Brooklyn, an executive editor at Spread magazine, a quarterly publication based in New York, who also reviews pornography for a Web site — and pays her taxes, she said.

"A lot of prostitutes are making just enough to get by and can qualify for certain tax credits, so filing can help them as well as make them feel like part of society," she said.