Lottery Time Frame error!!!

Trying to work out how this works makes my head hurt, so I just accept it and enjoy the movie.

Try reading the Back To The Future 2 board.

Yeah, it's the bearer of the ticket I believe. So he saw the future, bought the ticket, had shorty verify it and collect the winnings then later after the heat had died down came to collect his part of the cash.

Almost all lottery tickets in the US for one of the the big multistate mega lotteries are bought annonymously usually from a gas station or convenience store. I suppose that the buyers image would be on any surveilence tapes the establishment might have, but that's far from conclusive and would only be of consequence if there was a dispute over ownership or the ticket was lost, neither of which applies here. As far as the lottery is concerned ownership is really determined when the ticket is cashed in. There are some small percentage of tickets bought on subscription plans which would have an identity attached but this is obviously not one of them.

Furthermore the relevant taxing authorities give great latitude to the assignment of ownership of a winning ticket. It's one of the few things where ownership rights can be and regularly are assigned after the fact. You can have a lawyer put together a trust or a partnership and assign ownership percentages pretty much any way the actual buyer of the ticket desires, as long as it is done before the ticket is actually cashed. This is done to allow a winner to divide the money amongst family or friends without incurring gift and estate tax liabilities in addition to the federal, state and sometimes even local income tax liability.

In some states at least one winner (not necessarily the original or majority winner) must be publicly named and make themselves available for publicity photos and press conferences. Some states allow the winners to remain anonymous.

So here's all they would have to do. Get a lawyer to set up a trust. Ben, Uma and Paul would be the beneficiaries, but as long as the trust was being run by someone the three of them trusted their names might not even have to appear anywhere. As long as all the taxes owed got paid no one with the IRS is going to poke around under the covers too vigorously. This trust would own at least 99% of the winnings. They would probably want to give about 1% or even less to a "recruited" and unconnected party to stand up and be photographed as the winner (if the state requires it). It could be a distant relative, friend, or even a stranger known to the lawyer. I'm sure there are lots of people out there who would take a few hundred grand at the price of having every charity in country and hundreds if not thousands of hard luck cases and scam artists try to bum money off of them. This is a good idea even if you aren't quite possibly the most hunted fugitive on the planet.

What I do have a problem with is the idea of equating Ben's $90,000,000 worth of stock to a "nominally" valued $90,000,000 lottery ticket. In the real world the stock would be worth about 3 times as much as the ticket.

Ben's stock would have been worth $90 million. Since I'm sure the shares would have been valued at the low stock price when he began working on the project ($10 million or even less) and not the highly inflated $90 million value, most of the taxes on that money would be at the capital gains rate, and only become payable when Ben sold his shares. Furthermore, the company would probably have "grossed up" the original stock payment by paying an extra amount of cash to completely cover the earned income taxes on the original stock award. (Lets say that they might have given him $10 million in stock and another $10,000,000 in cash which would pay the taxes on the total award of $20,000,000). This may not seem to make sense, but it is how it is done every day, otherwise employees getting stock awards would have to turn around and sell between a quarter and half of the shares immediately to pay the tax liability they would have because of the gift of the shares in the first place. Even if Ben had cashed out completely as soon after the mind wipe as possible, he still probably would have netted about $75,000,000.

A $90 million lottery ticket on the other hand is not really worth $90,000,000. Since most lottery payouts of this size are really 25 or 30 year annuities, and the value quoted is the sum of the payments, not the present value, the actual value of a lump sum cash payout for the ticket would be only about half that much. Furthermore 100% of the money would be taxed at earned income tax rates at the time the money was paid by the lottery. Given all these factors Ben, Uma and Paul would have been lucky to keep $25,000,000 in total. To come out whole, the lottery would have needed to be for "in inflated hoopla terms" between $250 and 300 million.

Don't get me wrong, $25,000,000 (even split 3 ways) is still better than a sharp stick in the eye or a bullet on the catwalk and is certainly worth a lot more than a cage full of bird droppings. It is just that, the ticket hardly is the equivalent "fair exchange" for Ben's uber-rich "Paycheck" that the movie implies it to be.