It doesn’t take a fission engineer to deduce that more people would be willing to risk jail time to save 60% of their income than would be willing to risk jail time to save 25% of their income. Tim Lister of CNN.Opinion writes in Tax Evasion is a National Pastime in Southern Europe (emphasis added): “Wherever the [...]
Tags: Politics of Taxes · Tax Policy · The Economy
Yes, you read that correctly. The Journal of Accountancy reports that the IRS plans to start fingerprinting thousands of tax preparers as part of its oversight program and run the fingerprints through an FBI database: The IRS released more details on its tax preparer oversight program on Wednesday, and said registered tax return preparers would now be [...]
Tags: Announcements · IRS procedure · News · Regulation of Tax Preparers
Joe Kristan gives us the scoop on another case of absurd tax protester shenanigans (emphasis is mine): A pair of “professional astrologers” in California was enjoined last week from setting up sham trusts to conceal taxable income. That stuff doesn’t work, of course, but I liked this wrinkle: The pair is accused of having clients sign [...]
Tags: Absurd Tax Protester Arguments · Tax Crimes
IRS penalties are supposed to be assessed against a taxpayer only when his non-compliance is due to willful neglect rather than reasonable cause. Serious, debilitating health problems are almost always considered to be reasonable cause. Joe Kristan found a recent Tax Court decision overruling the IRS’s finding that a taxpayer’s brain injury was not sufficient to excuse the late filing of her tax returns: [...]
Tags: Court Cases · IRS Penalties
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
Joe Kristan tells of the case of Estate of Louise Paxton Gallagher, T.C. Memo. 2011-148 where the Tax Court made a valuation ruling more favorable to the taxpayer than what it had originally claimed on its tax return: The executor files an estate tax return valuing a 15% interest in an LLC at $34,936,000. The IRS audits the [...]
Tags: Court Cases · Estate Tax · IRS procedure
Joe Kristan chimes in on the issue of whether the estate tax makes any sense: David Logan puts it starkly: Simply put, the federal estate tax does nobody any good. Why? Estate taxes are generally levied for two reasons: To break up concentrations of dynastic wealth and to raise significant tax revenues. The seminal 1987 [...]
Tags: Estate Tax · Politics of Taxes
