Several months ago vice squads in West Palm Beach, Florida began the practice of giving local beat reporters the names and mugshots of men who had been arrested for allegedly soliciting prostitutes. I believed then, and still do, that in a country that declares a man to be innocent until proven guilty, the practice is illegal.¹ The reporters, of course, maintain that they have [...]
Tags: Legislative Watch · News · Opinion · State Taxes · Taxpayer Rights
Paul Caron discusses Danshera Cords’ Brandeis Law Review article Lien on Me: Virtual Debtors Prisons, The Practical Effects of Tax Liens and Proposals for Reform, 49 Brandeis L.J. 341 (2011): This Article discusses the harm that a notice of federal tax lien can cause an individual as a result of the effect of filing a notice of [...]
Tags: IRS Liens and Levies · IRS procedure · Taxpayer Rights
The following will come as no suprirse to anyone who has spent any amount of time dealing with the IRS and other government agencies. Michael Martinez of CNN writes: A new study by three universities shows that people holding positions of power with low status tend to demean others, one of the authors said. The [...]
Tags: IRS procedure · News · Taxpayer Rights
WebCPA once again reports that the IRS is not following its own rules: The Internal Revenue Service isn’t meeting a self-imposed 30-day deadline of responding to written inquiries from taxpayers, according to a new report. The report, from the Treasury Inspector General of Tax Administration, found that of 73 correspondence cases sampled from the IRS’s [...]
Tags: IRS procedure · News · Taxpayer Rights
William McBride of the Tax Policy Blog once again explains that the primary cause of the increasing deficit is spending cuts and not the Bush tax cuts: The CBO does not mince words. Health care spending is at the core of our budget deficits, and any serious discussion should address that. For more on why [...]
Tags: Politics of Taxes · Taxpayer Rights
This doesn’t come as a surprise to me, but it’s still disturbing. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has released its Fiscal Year 2011 Review of Compliance With Legal Guidelines When Conducting Seizures of Taxpayers’ Property (2011-30-049). It found that the IRS failed to follow the law in 38% of all seizures. In conducting its statutory [...]
Tags: IRS procedure · News · Taxpayer Rights
U.S. Appeals Court Judge Learned Hand famously wrote in Helvering v. Gregory, 69 F.2d 809 (1934) that, [A]nyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes. [...]
Tags: Tax Crimes · Tax Policy · Taxes 101 · Taxpayer Rights
