Taxpayers and their advisors have good reason to want to categorize losses as theft losses rather than investment losses. Theft losses are treated as ordinary losses and are deductible in the year incurred.¹ Investment losses are treated as capital losses and are limited to the amount of capital gains plus $3,000. It is, therefore, not surprising that TIGTA has [...]
Tags: Announcements · Deductible Expenses · IRS Audits · News
Jack Townsend has an excellent post today (all of his posts are excellent) about C corporation constructive dividends. In United States v. Ellefsen, ___ F.3d ___, 2011 U.S. App. LEXIS 18684 (8th Cir. 2011), the appeals court addressed the issue of whether the IRS properly reclassified payments made by a C corporation to a trust, [...]
Tags: C Corporations · Corporate Tax · Deductible Expenses · IRS Audits
In a recent post I criticized Howard Gleckman of Tax Vox for claiming that lower-income taxpayers who don’t itemize their deductions receive no benefit from their charitable contributions even though these taxpayers “gave about 3.5% of their income in 2009″ to charity. The reason for this, Gleckman asserted, is that [T]hese taxpayers can only take the deduction [...]
Tags: Deductible Expenses · Tax Policy · Taxes 101
Peter Whoriskey of the Washington Post apparently thinks he’s stumbled onto something important in Some Companies Pay Their CEOs More than Uncle Sam: It has become a bipartisan article of faith in some quarters that the income tax on U.S. corporations must be lowered. But for many large U.S. companies, the burden of U.S. taxation [...]
Tags: C Corporations · Corporate Tax · Deductible Expenses · Politics of Taxes · Tax Policy
You have to have class-warfarism steeped in the marrow of your bones to criticize a person for giving too much money to charity. But this is precisely what pro-taxers do when they claim that the rich unfairly benefit, at the expense of the poor, from the charitable contribution deduction.¹ Howard Gleckman ² of Tax Vox [...]
Tags: Deductible Expenses · News · Politics of Taxes · Tax Policy
Kenneth Harney of The Washington Post says that elimination or scale-back of the mortgage interest deduction is on the table in deficit negotiations: After decades of being considered politically sacrosanct, why are homeowner mortgage write-offs suddenly on the chopping block? Sheer size is the No. 1 reason. The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that [...]
Tags: Deductible Expenses · Legislative Watch · Tax Policy
There is an epidemic of blame shifting in the housing crisis. People who knew or should have known that they would not be able to honor the terms of the mortgage notes they signed when they expected housing values to rise are, now that housing prices have declined, attempting to shift the blame to their lenders for giving [...]
Tags: Court Cases · Deductible Expenses · Taxes 101
