Conor McGregor Tax Liabilities
For those of you who follow Boxing or MMA, the spectacle that is Mayweather vs McGregor has begun. Both will lock horns on August 26th and both men lived up, or down, depending on your perspective, to their reputations when they met for the first time last night in Los Angeles.
This could well be the biggest pay-per-view fight ever, and the numbers are mind boggling, with some commentators claiming this will be the first BILLION dollar fight.
The interesting thing (we are accountants after all!) is the fact that ‘Money’ Mayweather has outstanding tax liabilities from 2015 and has tried unsuccessfully to agree a time to pay arrangement with the IRS.
As with HMRC, having analysed assets the IRS suggested Floyd secure a loan or liquidate assets to cover the outstanding, while Mayweather was hoping to defer settlement until after the McGregor fight, when he is likely to pick up a 9 digit cheque.
Floyd has tried to rebuke any concerns around his financial affairs:
“While everyone is counting my money and assuming the worst, these are the facts… Uncle Sam, received $26,000,000.00 from me in 2015! What else could they possibly want? I’m sure I would have been notified much sooner if there were any real discrepancies right? Bottom line, everybody just wants to be a part of the ‘Money May’ show, including the IRS! That’s fine, you can crunch numbers all day but in the end, my empire is rock solid and intact! Now Calculate That!”
In light of Floyd’s disastrous tax planning, we thought it only right to lend a hand and present a tax analysis of Conor’s earnings from this fight, rumoured to be a cool $50m.
The options assessed were Conor operating through a UK Limited company. This would be a Personal Service Company like many ‘Contractors’ and given that it is unlikely the Mayweather camp would accept a substitute in place of Conor, we have also worked the numbers with the income being caught by IR35.
The final analysis is with Conor as a sole trader. An underdog in normal trading scenarios where income is higher than basic rate, however the results here are surprising, maybe like those on August 26th?!
