"Bohage says the group has to take the winnings in cash, but they first have to go to court to legally split them."

I didn't realize the court got involved when there wasn't a dispute.  I've heard some states don't  give out tax forms that allow each pool members to pay his share of the taxes individually unless the prizes is in the millions.  Too much paper work and besides one person would probably owe more on $10K then 7 people would owe on $1.4K individually.

You can bet all the workers at the cheese factory remember their last big win and with these guys just winning a PB $10K prize again, there's a factory pool for this Saturday drawing for $300M for sure.

I wonder how they all spent their original $700,000.  Have any gone broke yet?

RJOh -  note that more than 7 people won.  It says Fifteen people won in all.  So they each only won $666.  So now we know why they're so lucky!!  LOL 

I hope they don't spend it all in one place.

Going to court sounds like the complicated way to do it. One of them should just claim it, pay the taxes, and then make a gift to each member of the group. Better still, have somebody in a low tax bracket claim it and keep $250 for their trouble.

My mistake. Now it's even clearer why they wanted to legally split it.

Before I retired the factory pool I was in won second prize three times and no one in the pool wanted to cash the ticket and be responsible for the extra taxes since the state never took out enough money.

We all decided the the pool members with kids in college and no job could pick one of them to cash it in, we paid he/she a fee and since their tax bracket was lower, they would also get a refund when they filed their taxes.

As soon as I saw "cheese" I was thinking Wisconsin. I wonder if this is near the "miracle mile".

That's odd, Coin Toss.   When I hear "cheese" I think of photographers. 

Did the first winners buy a cottage?  (groan)  or did they put their money into a Swiss bank account? This story certainly has a lot of holes it in.  I wonder why anyone would hire a lawyer since they usually know jack about the lottery.  Plus a lawyer would only grill the 15 members which wouldn't be gouda at all, so they should just stop worrying about who gets a pizza the prize and just process the claim before they all age too much.  After all, it's not such a grate amount and if someone isn't entitled to anything he can say to him "Hey, it's nacho cheese."

Oh, BTW, I agree with KY Floyd about just giving the money as a gift to the others.  This doesn't make sense to me either.

LMAOROFL !!!!   

Any way you slice it, you sure have a KRAFTy way with words, JXP !!!

That was cheesy.

Good one DD!  I chedder thought of that one myself, but my brain didn't process it. 

I was in a pool, with 9 others. We hit 5/6 in Lotto. We had 1 person claim it , with the other 9 names, address, SSn. Each person received a W-2G form, showing winning amount and taxes withheld. The Lottery Regional office took care of the paperwork and the check was made out to 1 person with taxes deducted.

congrats on your win. are you still playing in the pool?