Did John Boehner Stutter?
Let's try this again: U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner on Thursday dismissed suggestions that Republicans were warming to raising revenue as a part of a plan to cut the deficit, adding that tax hikes on millionaires would cost jobs. The top Republican in Congress blasted a proposal from House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi to […]
David Cay Johnston’s Plan to Save Social Security Has Some Really Big IFs
David Cay Johnston has a story with the counterintuitive headline "Social security is not going broke." How does that work? With the coming bulge in retirees, Social Security will start to pay out more than it takes in 2021, according to projections in the latest annual report. Under current law the program would be able […]
This Woman’s Tax Season Has Been Infinitely Worse Than Yours
Yeah, we all have our tax season stories. Like remember the day in April when you got arrested on charges of stealing from your business partner while your husband got arrested for making a drunken spectacle of himself at the local elementary school? You don’t? Then your story can’t top this one out of the […]
Kids! Join the Voluntary Tax Accountant Extinction Movement!
The world doesn’t owe us a living. Of course you know that. If you thought the world did owe you a living, you wouldn’t have gotten that Accounting degree. You’d have gone for that much easier Critical Gender Studies or 19th-Century American History ticket. But even when you get that first tax accountant job, […]
Seasonal Tax Preparers Would Be Wise to Dismiss Drug Trafficking As an Option in the Off-season
The life of the seasonal tax preparer isn’t for sissies. You work your butt off for 15 or so weeks, neglecting family and loved ones, and then you still have 37 weeks to kill. Some people just live off their tax season earnings and the odd extension. Some find work that matches the tax […]
Don’t Immediately Dismiss Naming Your Company After a Murderous Dictator
We’d all like to settle our taxes for pennies on the dollar. Sadly, two of the biggest providers of pennies-on-the-dollar tax settlements — JK Harris and Roni Deutch — have left their clients with, well, pennies on the dollar in liquidation. Only the best neck-beard in the late-night TV tax settlement business carries on. Being […]
And Now, the Day After: Two Tales of Love and Taxes Gone Wrong
When they set the date for Valentine’s day, they avoided April 15 for good reasons. True love and taxes often mix badly. Consider: The centerpiece of a multi-state federal investigation into tax fraud and identity theft was sentenced Friday to three years in prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and fraudulent use of bank […]
Could Someone Have Tax Problems Big Enough to Walk Away From $14 million?
That’s one explanation for a weird story where a New York lawyer acting on behalf of holder of a winning lottery ticket purchased at a Des Moines convenience store let the ticket expire rather than revealing the identity of the ticket owner. The ticket was turned in hours before its expiration by a Des […]
Maybe We Should Wait to Throw More Money at the IRS’s Problems
Wouldn’t life be sweet if our bosses gave us more money when we failed? Gee, I wouldn’t have hit on the client’s daughter at that bar if only you paid me better… Yet that’s just what we’re supposed to do with the IRS. Caleb notes that the Taxpayer Advocate pointed out all sorts of ways […]
Watch Out for the IRS Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Bait-and-switch
If your creepy uncle, known for bad behavior with underaged girlfriends, bought an ice cream truck, you’d not trust him to limit himself to selling ice cream. Last year the Taxpayer Advocate’s Office tried to force the IRS to stop luring people who have foot-faulted their foreign account reporting obligations with the promises of leniency, […]
The Year in Taxes: Sleepwalking Through 2011
In January, the tax world was still reeling from the extension of the Bush-era tax rate cuts signed into law in December. It also allowed rich people who died in 2010 to go to their rest without paying estate taxes, making George Steinbrenner a happy ghost. It also allowed living taxpayers to make tax-free […]
It Takes a Special Kind of Scumbag to Steal a Dead Child’s Identity To Commit Tax Fraud
There are crimes, and there are tax crimes. Murder and rape stir primitive urges of revenge and retribution. Scamming old folks makes you want to get out the tar and feathers. Tax crimes, not so much. Sure, you realize why they jail people for tax evasion – to make an example of them. But you don’t usually […]
The IRS Occasionally Falls for a Crackpot Theory That Says Everyone Born in the U.S. Is Entitled to $630,000
Of the many implausible theories in the tax resister netherworld, it's hard to beat the "1099-OID / redemption" theories for pure crazy. Unless, of course, you think it's perfectly sensible to believe that the government has a big secret pot of cash with your name on it, and you can tap it if you just […]
Don’t Look Now But There Is Glimmer of Sensible Tax Policy in Congress
A long-overdue measure to limit state taxation of non-residents has cleared its first committee, reports the Tax Policy Blog. The House Judiciary Committee approved H.R. 1864, the Mobile Workforce State Income Tax Simplification Act, which provides:
An employee’s wages or other remuneration shall be subject to state income tax only in either:
-the employee’s state of residence, or
-a state where the employee is present and performing employment duties for more than 30 days during the calendar year. A day counts if the employee performs more employment duties in that state than in any other state during that day. Travel time does not count.
For traveling taxpayers, that’s good news. Lord knows how many loyal Going Concern readers flit from state to state in their unceasing efforts to ensure that the Nation’s financial statements are fairly stated in all material respects. But it’s also bad news — it reminds us that right now you can be taxable in a state after spending as little as a day there.
Why are the states so greedy? Think of LeBron James. When he visits the Staples Center to beat up the Clippers, the home team may lose, but the Franchise Tax Board wins every time. But the tax law in its majesty applies as much to the newbie auditor sent to count vegetables as to LeBron.
Fortunately for our auditor, the firm will probably tell her how much of her income is taxable in each state. Unfortunately, it won’t do all of the extra tax returns she will have to file in all of the exciting states a modern jet-setting auditor may visit.
H.R. 1864 is a long way from perfect. Its biggest flaw is that it doesn’t protect visiting entertainers or athletes. Sure, LeBron can afford the tax help to file in a couple dozen states, but the same rules apply to minor league ballplayers, comedians trying to become senators, and your friendly struggling road band. Still, anything that helps abused staff accountants isn’t all bad.
The proposal is a long ways from becoming law. The high tax states hate any limitations on their ability to pick visitor pockets. Still, it’s nice to have at least a glimmer of hope for sanity.
IRS to Allow Deduction of Medical Expenses for Those Diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder
When nature makes a mistake, it can be expensive to repair. Rhiannon O’Donnabhain long suspected that nature had mistakenly assigned him to the wrong team, and after growing up male, fathering three children, and getting divorced, looked into fixing that. A diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) was reached, and the process began.
There was a lot involved. The Tax Court says the process included:
– 20 weekly individual therapy sessions.
– Hormone therapy
– facial surgery
– genital surgical sex reassignment
– breast augmentation surgery
This process continued under the watchful (but not free) observation of a therapist.
Now female, O’Donnabhain deducted $21,741 in medical expenses related to the reassignment on her 2001 return. The IRS objected, but the Tax Court upheld her medical deductions for all but the breast augmentation (they said that was cosmetic, not medical).
The expert testimony also establishes that given (1) the risks, pain, and extensive rehabilitation associated with sex reassignment surgery, (2) the stigma encountered by persons who change their gender role and appearance in society, and (3) the expert-backed but commonsense point that the desire of a genetic male to have his genitals removed requires an explanation beyond mere dissatisfaction with appearance (such as GID or psychosis), petitioner would not have undergone hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery except in an effort to alleviate the distress and suffering attendant to GID. Respondent’s contention that petitioner undertook the surgery and hormone treatments to improve appearance is at best a superficial characterization of the circumstances that is thoroughly rebutted by the medical evidence.
Now the IRS has changed its mind. In an Action on Decision published yesterday the IRS said that they will follow the Tax Court’s decision and will allow gender reassignment costs as a medical deduction for diagnosed GID.
Unfortunately, there still is no known medical fix for Accountants Personality Disorder. Medicine remains helpless to treat the many rock stars trapped in CPA personalities.
Threatening to Kill an IRS Employee Over the Phone Is Not Advised
Everybody admires a CPA who is willing to stand up to the IRS for a client. To a point.
A New York CPA went past that point, according to the IRS Office of Professional Responsibility. If the testimony of an IRS agent before an administrative law judge is to be believed, the CPA, George Diehl, is at least guilty of a social faux pas in a conversation with IRS Revenue Officer Miamouna Diakite when she refused to put a 45-day hold on collection of a client account.
From the ALJ opinion:
Diakite stated that Diehl refused to enter into an installment agreement. Diakite testified that he became irate and loud, saying that he had obtained holds on accounts routinely, and asked to speak to Diakite’s supervisor. Diakite told him that, pursuant to IRS procedure, her supervisor would call him within 24 hours. He insisted on talking to her supervisor immediately. Diakite then, also pursuant to protocol, told him that the account was then in “collection status” whereby the IRS “will” levy against Taxpayer 1’s bank account, garnish her salary and obtain liens on her real and personal property.
Diakite testified that Diehl became very upset and said “do you know what I do to people like you. I kill them.” Diakite replied “you don’t mean that, sir” and Diehl replied “I do. I do. I’ll kill you.” Diakite then sat at her desk repeating to herself aloud that Diehl said that he would kill her and he is in New York. She became frightened and then heard a male voice, not Diehl’s, saying “what are you doing?” and the phone was then disconnected.
The opinion never does say who the “male voice” belongs to. Somebody with better manners, perhaps.
The ALJ did believe the agent:
I find that Diehl threatened Diakite. His credibility was shaken by first stating that his words to her was that you are “killing me with your stupidity and then changing that testimony to state that you are “killing me with your bullshit.”
So for all of you aspiring CPAs out there, some lessons:
• Try not to let client tax matters get to a point where you have to argue on a hold for collection.
• Don’t threaten to kill the agents. They don’t like that, and it tends to make it more difficult to get them to help your client.
•Don’t be a pottymouth. That bad language completely blew it with that nice administrative law judge.
Who’s Afraid of Tax Reform?
The last time I saw the family dentist while I was in college, he asked me what I was studying. When I told him I was studying tax accounting, he got a strange, smug look on his face and asked, “what are you going to do when there is a flat tax?”
It’s been almost 30 years since I saw that dentist, and so far I’ve dodged the flat tax bullet. There has been one big tax reform since I started public accounting, and next to getting fired by good old Price Waterhouse, The Tax Reform of 1986 has been the best thing that happened to my career.
The 1986 Tax Reform Act’s 25th anniversary is tomorrow. With talk of radical tax reform in the air, from Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan to Rick Perry’s embrace of an old-fashioned flat tax, young tax nerds may lose sleep worrying that this time tax careers really will be legislated out of existence.
Go back to bed. For young tax nerds, radical change can be a huge career boost.
The 1986 tax reforms were enacted during my third year out of school. The local office of my national firm was going to put on a big client seminar, and I was put in charge of organizing the presentation. In the pre-Internet days, we got one paperback copy of the legislation, which I tore apart at the bindings so the presenters could have their part of the law. I proofread the slides, sent them to the photographer, and then manually arranged the presentation in the slide carousel (there was no PowerPoint, kids).
The seminar came off well (I did passive losses), which helped keep me (and the evil manager who didn’t like me) from getting me fired again. But in the following weeks the real benefit began to dawn on me — thanks to tax reform, I suddenly knew more about most of the tax law than everybody in the office who outranked me — including the evil manager. It got me promoted quickly, and it gave me much-needed credibility a few years later when a bunch of us went over the wall to start a new firm.
If there is radical tax reform, it will trash a lot of accumulated tax trivia knowledge that experienced tax nerds trade on. But it will also create huge opportunities for young, smart nerds who are willing to learn the new rules. It will be a great leveller in the profession, and a huge advantage to the young and strong.
But it will probably make it almost impossible for me to sell my collection of 1986 Tax Act books for a good price on e-Bay.
Will JK Harris and TaxMasters Join the Tax Lady in the Late-Night-Tax-Problem-Solver Body Count?
“Pennies on the dollar” may be a great pitch on cable television, but it’s not a surefire business plan. Desperate taxpayers who have paid money up front to JK Harris to resolve their tax debts at a discount are joining the IRS as potential “pennies on the dollar” creditors now that this leader in the tax settlement industry is filing for bankruptcy protection.
This is the second major blow this year to cable TV ad revenues. Earlier this year “Tax Lady” Roni Deutch gave up her law license in the face of charges that she took fees up front to resolve tax debts and failed to follow through.
Tax nerds see the late night ads when we get home and wonder how these outfits manage to get such great deals out of the IRS when getting the Service to actually forgive tax debts is like pulling teeth from a grumpy rhino for the rest of us.
TaxMasters now stands as the biggest remaining player in the TV tax settlement business, but they have their own problems. They were de-listed last month from the OTC Bulletin Board to the pink sheets for failing to file their 10-Q due August 15. The last reported trade for Taxs.pk is at 13 cents. They have also been sued by the Minnesota Attorney General for allegedly deceptive practices. ABC News reported on the suit:
The Minnesota attorney general says many of the company’s employees are skilled tele-marketers who have little knowledge of the complicated tax issues faced by people who have fallen behind in filing their returns or making tax payments. “When you call, you think you’re talking to a tax professional,” said Swanson. “You’re really talking to just a salesperson who’s trying to get you to sign up.”
So maybe the secret is that the late night settlement outfits are staffed by telemarketers who just happen to be awesome at selling pennies-on-the-dollar deals to the IRS. If that’s true, though, they seem to be having a lot of trouble turning what would truly be a remarkable and valuable skill into profits.
And I’d Have Gotten Away with It if It Weren’t for Those Blasted Accountants!
If you can get away with tax cheating, is it malpractice for your CPA to make you stop?
A Massachusetts CPA firm found out a new client was using a lame old trick. The S corporation had paid out $1 million to its owner over the years without putting it on a W-2 or treating it as a distribution from the company. Instead, the company every year booked it as a “loan” to the owners – a loan with no note, no interest rate, no security, and no repayments.
This is a time-dishonored way for people who carelessly suck cash out of a corporation to try to avoid the tax consequences – though it is less common in S corporations. It normally fails if the IRS figures it out.
The CPAs told the client that the “loan” should be reclassed as “wages” on the 2002 return to clean it up. The client owner was not excited, and talked to a lawyer to see if there was another way. After the first lawyer failed to satisfy, she talked to a second lawyer, who agreed with the CPA. The client reluctantly filed an amended return, and the owner found herself with a $500,000 tax lien.
At a national firm where I once worked, an audit partner would go from one tax person to another until he found one who told him what he wanted to hear. The client here took that approach, eventually finding a practitioner willing to prepare the 2002 return the old way. That was enough to get the client to file another amended return claiming a refund and to sue the old CPA for malpractice. That might have been a bad decision, in light of this reaction from the astonished judge:
It is surprising that Plaintiffs had the temerity to bring this lawsuit. The complaint was clearly filed too late. The record, mainly as a result of Plaintiffs’ failure to file long-overdue tax returns, is utterly insufficient to demonstrate damages. Most importantly, it is clear that Plaintiffs for many years enjoyed over $1,000,000 in income without paying any taxes on it, and they accomplished this by filing a tax return that improperly characterized the monies they received as a loan. It is close to ludicrous to claim that, by advising Plaintiffs to amend the 2002 tax return to conform with what the law and good accounting practice required, Defendants were being negligent. On the contrary, they were serving their clients ethically and well.
The judge also implied that the client might have been unwise in calling attention to the matter by filing the suit:
As a result of behaving professionally, Defendants have found themselves slapped with this expensive lawsuit. That undeserved headache, at least, is now over. The court can only hope that the IRS and the state authorities will make sure that Plaintiffs now proceed to do what everyone who enjoys the privilege of living in our beloved country is required to do: pay their fair share of taxes.
In other words: come and get ‘em, IRS!
In a world full of charlatans, it can be tough out there for CPAs who try to do the right thing. When you do, it’s nice to know at least one judge has your back.
That Tax Shelter Seemed Like a Really Good Idea at the Time
It helps to be really smart if you want to talk yourself into something really stupid. That’s how a lot of bad tax shelters happen. Let’s call this one the “Dumb-Ass Deduction Distressed Asset-Debt” (“DAD^2” or “DAD-squared”) shelter.
The ingredients:
• A bunch of near-worthless consumer receivables from a struggling Brazilian department store chain.
• A whip-smart Chicago tax lawyer, John E. Rogers.
• A bunch of LLC partnerships for tax-motivated investors.
• Some cash.
The Brazilians contribute their receivables – purportedly with a big built-in loss – to a partnership. This partnership contributes the debt to other LLCs. Shortly afterwards the first LLC buys out the Brazilians, who are desperate for cash, leaving the crappy receivables behind. The investor partnerships then write off the debts as bad debt deductions, giving big tax losses to the investors.
It can’t fail, right? Well, aside from the obvious problems, like:
– The tax law presumes that if a partner (think Brazilians here) contributes stuff to a partnership, and then gets cash back in redemption of the interest within two years, then it wasn’t really a tax-free partnership contribution and distribution. Instead, the tax law presumes that the Brazilian sold the stuff for cash. The partnership was just a place to hide it for awhile.
– If the Brazilians hadn’t sold out, the tax law would have required them to get all of the losses. The tax law doesn’t let taxpayers shift gains or losses to others by joining a partnership. After all, that’s what S corporations are for.
The guy who put this thing together was smart, as people who put together sophisticated tax deals always are. The Tax Court spells it out:
Rogers is a member of the International Fiscal Association, an international tax group. He has also been a trustee of the Tax Foundation, a publicly supported foundation that researches tax policy issues and publishes papers. Rogers has worked with the Governments of Puerto Rico and Romania in developing programs implementing their industrial taxation programs. Rogers has written a number of publications, primarily on international tax matters, transfers of technology, the use of low-tax jurisdictions, and the compensation of executives outside the United States. In 1997 Rogers was invited to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee on fundamental international tax reform.
When a plan by someone who is that smart fails, it fails spectacularly. Tax Court Judge Wherry disallowed all of the bad debt deductions, and imposed penalties, pointing a finger at the lawyer-mastermind:
There has been no showing of reasonable cause or good faith on Rogers’ part in conceptualizing, designing, and executing the transactions. To the contrary, as we have detailed above, Rogers’ knowledge and experience should have put him on notice that the tax benefits sought by the form of the transactions would not be forthcoming…
I’m sure that, over drinks, Mr. Rogers would have me convinced that he was right. That’s why you should never buy a tax shelter until you sober up.
If All Corporations Are People, Should All People Be Corporations?
Ed. note: We’re happy to welcome tax sage Joe Kristan back to a regular posting spot in these pages. This is his first effort for us but insists that he won’t feel as though he’s truly returned until he’s trolled by Adrienne.
Megan McArdle ponders one of life’s great questions:
One of the main “real world” elements of the case for the corporate income tax, as I understand it, is that failure to impose such a tax would simply create an inviting method for evasion of individual income taxes.
The question I always have about this is: “Well, why don’t more people do this now?”
The biggest reason we don’t all corporations to dodge taxes is that it is unnecessary. People looking to nickel and dime their way to deductions long ago learned that all you need is a Schedule C to have a place to hide a deduction for your dog (“security expense”) or your girlfriend (“theft loss”). This idea is one of the foundations of the multi-level marketing industry, and was carried to spectacular lengths by a recently closed Iowa tax preparer. Megan senses the limits to this approach:
And the reason that it’s mostly pretty minor is that if you are obviously using a corporation to fund your lifestyle, then the IRS will descend upon you like a plague of deranged cicadas.
There’s something to that, even though the cicada analogy implies a nimbleness unlikely in the IRS; a herd of flesh-eating slugs would be more apt.
Still, a corporation does offer some tax-sheltering possibilities. One is that C corporations can normally use any fiscal year. By shuffling income between an individual and a corporation with a November tax year, you can, in theory, get 11 months deferral of income — at least until you are caught. Corporations have a 15% tax rate on their first $50,000 of taxable income, giving higher-bracket individuals possibilities of shifting income to a lower bracket. And C corporation shareholder-employees get some benefits unavailable elsewhere.
Yet these chiseling possibilities have serious limits. The fiscal year games require you to have real live business expenses. A Kansas City attorney who marketed such deals crashed against this requirement. Income of “personal service corporations” like law and accounting firms are taxed at a flat 35%, making them useless as a tax shelter. The personal holding company rules impose a special tax on corporations used to shelter income from investments.
Then there is what I call “friction” — the time and effort required to play the games necessary to juggle income between a corporation and an individual. You have to file a corporation tax return and keep corporate records. You have to compute both personal and corporate income accurately during the year to know how much income to juggle. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands, the effort may well be better spent actually making money.
Finally, C corporations have one overwhelming problem: the double-tax dilemma. Unlike S corporations, which report their income on shareholder tax returns, C corporations have their income taxed twice — first when earned, and again when distributed or recovered on a stock sale. There are games you can play to get it out as a deduction to the corporation, but these have their problems. Take cash out as compensation and you incur payroll taxes; take it out as rent and you actually need something you can lease to the corporation with a straight face. Distribute an appreciated asset to yourself and the corporation is taxed on the gain. The Bittker and Eustice tax treatise has a classic summary of the problem:
Decisions to embrace the corporate form of organization should be carefully considered, since a corporation is like a lobster pot: easy to enter, difficult to live in, and painful to get out of.
These problems could be solved by taxing individuals and corporations at the same rates and allowing a deduction for dividends paid. Unfortunately, the chances of that are as likely as the chances of your brother-in-law making good pre-tax money from his Amway operation.
Three Important Filing Tips for Luddites
There is an immense body of law governing whether last-minute tax filings are timely. So often a cheap little postmark is all that stands between a taxpayer and tax catastrophe. With the IRS herding preparers and taxpayers towards e-filing, timely-mailed, timely-filed cases may seem like an arcane body of law, like piracy cases, but paper filing still has some proud hard-core holdouts, and sometimes only a paper filing will do. At the Tax Court, for example, where the website says “Initial filings, such as the petition, may be filed only in paper form.”
The tax law says that a tax return is considered timely-filed if it is mailed on the due date, but the shift to e-filing can make things awkward for paper filers. For example, few post offices still offer late April 15 hours for last-minute paper filers. Stepping into the last-minute filer void are authorized private carriers of tax documents, like FedEx and UPS. A proper shipping document by an authorized private carrier can document timely filing. That gives taxpayers new ways to meet disaster, as the Tax Court illustrated this week.
A California couple wanting to take the IRS to Tax Court had a July 20, 2009 deadline for filing their petition. They filed by FedEx, perhaps at a FedEx/Kinkos location. They generated a shipping label on their home computer with a July 20 date. But FedEx spoiled everything, as the Tax Court explains:
The petition, which was sent by FedEx Express (FedEx), was received and filed by the Court on Thursday, July 23, 2009. The envelope containing the petition bore two shipping labels. The first shipping label, which had been placed inside a clear plastic pouch adhered to the envelope, had been electronically generated by the sender using FedEx Ship Manager (customer generated label). The second shipping label, which had been affixed to the outside of the clear plastic pouch, had been electronically generated by FedEx (FedEx-generated label).
Of course the FedEx-generated label had a July 21 date. And that, says the Tax Court, is the date that counts, and our couple was out of luck.
So what does that mean to you?
• File electronically if you can. You get a nice electronic confirmation that you can beat up the IRS with, and you don’t have to worry about your valuable tax forms going awry.
• If you must paper-file, Registered Mail or Certified Mail, Return Receipt Requested, are still the best deal in town. They’ll generally be cheaper than a private carrier, and that hand-stamped certified mail postmark has the same effect on IRS agents as sunlight on Dracula.
• If you find yourself at FedEx/Kinkos late on April 15, make sure the clerk knows that you need them to stamp it before midnight. If you use private delivery, be sure to use the proper street address, as the private carriers can’t deliver to post office boxes.
Otherwise, you might find yourself trying to reach Jiffy Express.
“Even liars and hucksters have First Amendment rights”
A horrible fate must await an attorney when a judge has these things to say about him:
“Just because other accountants and professionals were doing something wrong does not excuse Defendant’s misconduct.”
“Defendant’s reasoning is so specious that he should have known it was wrong.”
“Defendant has been quite adept at hiding his involvement in these activities in an effort to develop what he believes is plausible deniability. Ultimately, his denials are implausible.”
“As stated earlier, the Court believes that promotion of tax schemes and structures is now Defendant’s modus operandi. These were not isolated occurrences, and the nature of his preferred method of business indicates it will continue to ng business.”
“Defendant describes himself as a “rainmaker,” and the Court finds that practically everything he has done in that capacity has been improper. The Court has no reason to believe he would not concoct and promote some other scheme of doubtful validity.”
So this led to…maybe a referral to the local attorney disciplinary board? A broad and sweeping injunction against doing further tax work?
Well, a Kansas City judge barred defendant A. Blair Stover from promoting three “schemes” he no longer promotes anyway. The judge also required him to run any other tax planning ideas by the IRS before marketing them. No disbarment. No banishment. Just “sin no more.”
Why the seeming leniency?
An injunction prohibiting Defendant from providing tax advice raises serious First Amendment concerns. The Government has a strong and valid interest in preventing fraud, and the First Amendment does not protect fraudulent statements. However, the Government has no interest in preventing true statements, and even liars and hucksters have First Amendment rights. Conceivably, Defendant could provide lawful and accurate tax advice, and the Court is unwilling (and probably unable) to prevent him from doing so.
I like the First Amendment. Without it I might have been moved to an oubliette underneath IRS Headquarters long ago. Yet the first in line in the bill of rights hasn’t stopped other judges from shutting down tax scheme promoters. For example, a federal judge enjoined tax protest guru Bill Benson from:
promoting, organizing, or selling (or helping others to promote, organize, or sell) any other tax shelter, plan, or arrangement that incites or assists others to attempt to violate the internal revenue laws or unlawfully evade the assessment or collection of their federal tax liabilities or unlawfully claim improper tax refunds.
Benson appealed on First Amendment grounds. The Seventh Circuit turned him down:
Benson purported to be selling a way to avoid tax liability; what he was actually selling was a way to increase tax and criminal liability for failing to pay taxes. That is false advertising, which may be banned consistent with the First Amendment.
Some years back a Des Moines gentleman vigorously promoted Employee Stock Ownership Plans as a tax cure-all, which had a number of unfortunate consequences. The Eighth Circuit didn’t let the First Amendment get in the way from permanently enjoining him and his CPA practice “…from acting as a service provider to any ERISA plan.”
Perhaps there’s something in ERISA that overrides the First Amendment the same way “ERISA preemption” keeps states from regulating many features of pension plans. Maybe the Eighth Circuit was wrong. But if the Kansas City judge’s opinion gets it right, you can get away with a lot in tax practice before you are drummed out altogether.
TurboTax Jockey Tim Geithner Says Tax Increases Won’t Hurt Small Businesses a Bit
The top individual tax rate is scheduled to jump to 39.6% on January 1, 2011. To those of us who do private business tax returns for a living, one effect is obvious: this will raise the tax rate on LLC and S corporation income.
But now Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says that all my small business clients thy rich law partners and CEOs (my emphasis):
Ninety-seven percent of small businesses in this country would not pay a penny more due to letting these upper-income tax rates expire.
Now some have argued that even if only a few percent of small business owners make over $250,000, these few make up a vast amount of supposedly small business income.
This argument apparently counts anyone who receives any type of partnership or business income as if they were a small business.
By this standard, every partner in a major law firm and every principal in a major financial institution would count as a separate small business. A CEO who has board fees or speech fees would also count as a small business owner under this overly broad definition.
Well yes, Timmy, “some” have argued for that “overly broad definition” — your friends who say 97% of small businesses won’t be affected by the scheduled tax increase. A 2009 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is a source of the talking point that only a tiny fraction of businesses will be affected by the expiration of the tax increase. They define a small business 1040 as:
…any tax unit that receives any income (or loss) from a sole proprietorship, farm proprietorship, partnership, S corporation, or rental income.
So while a CEO who has board fees will count as a separate small business — as will President Obama, for that matter — so will every taxpayer that has a schedule C, schedule E or Schedule F. Your office Mary Kay girl or Shacklee dealer counts as a small business. Everybody who moonlights and reports their income is a small business. Everybody who rents out a duplex or vacation home counts, as does every taxpayer who holds, even briefly, an interest in a publicly-traded oil and gas partnership.
So how much small business economic activity will be hit by the increase in the top rate? A lot more than 3%. The center-left Tax Policy Center estimates that 44.3% of taxable income of these “small businesses” will be hit with next year’s scheduled tax increase (hat tip: Howard Gleckman). That seems low, if anything, based on what I see in practice.
It’s the successful, growing and profitable S corporations and partnerships that push their owners into the top tax brackets. Growing businesses typically distribute only enough income to owners to cover taxes — either by inclination or by agreements with lenders. Their remaining earnings go into growing the business or paying off the bank. If you increase their taxes, it either reduces growth and hiring or their ability to service their debt — neither of which does much for the economy.
When Tim Geithner says that the only people who will get hit by his tax increase are rich lawyers and director fee millionaires, it may tell us something about his social world. It tells us nothing about how the tax increase will hit business owners.
Land Yachts and the Tax Law: Four Tips to Avoid “At-Risk” Pitfalls
If there’s one thing the economy offers to businesses nowadays, it’s opportunities to lose money. As unpleasant as that is, it at least will reduce your taxes, right?
Maybe.
Even tax loss parties have their poopers, and the “At-risk rules” of Code Sec. 465 are as poopy as can be. Drafted to fight the first generation of retail tax shelters in the 1970s, these rules have faded into obscurity, but remain available for annoyingly competent IRS agents to wield against your loss deductions. The rules are supposed to defer losses when it’s really the lender on the hook for them, rather than the nominal owner of the money-losing activity. The losses carry forward to offset future income on the activity, or gain on a sale someday.
These rules pooped all over the tax loss of CTI Leasing, an LLC owned by Kieth Roberts, an Indiana man, to lease trucks to his trucking company. He loanded the LLC $425,000 to buy a “Vantare H3-45 Super S2” RV. The Tax Court says “Vantare RVs are custom-built, fully furnished, luxury coach RVs known for their ‘yacht quality fit and finish.'”
The leasing business cranked out tax losses. The IRS disallowed $425,000 of them on the grounds that the $425,000 loan didn’t give the LLC owner “at-risk” basis in his leasing activity. The Tax Court said the taxpayer failed to show that the land yacht was used in the truck leasing business or was owned by it, so the $425,000 wasn’t “at-risk” in the leasing activity.
Not every business can afford a nice land yacht, but they all can lose money. Some pointers to help keep you from trippng over the at-risk rules:
• If your loan is “non-recourse” — if you don’t pay, all the lender can do is repossess the property — that’s an at-risk rule red flag.
• Limited partners and LLC members are likely to face at-risk issues; the whole point of a “limited liability company” is to limit owner liability, after all.
• Be careful of loans from related parties. If you borrow from the wrong person, the tax law will treat the loan as not “at-risk,” even if you borrow from a business partner who might leave you under an end-zone somewhere if you don’t pay up.
• If you are in the real-estate business, “qualified” non-recourse debt – generally third-party commercial loans – are O.K. under the at-risk rules.
If you trip over the at-risk rules, your losses may not be gone forever. Form 6198 tracks your deferred losses, and you can lose them if your activity generates income someday.
Joe Kristan is a shareholder of Roth & Company, P.C. in Des Moines, Iowa, author of the Tax Update Blog and Going Concern contributor. You can see all of his posts for GC here.
Patch This or: How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Alternative Minimum Tax
Congress has been twisting itself into knots to pass 70-odd special interest “expiring provisions” this spring, though without success. These provisions that have come within one or two votes of being extended one more time are almost all special-interest provisons, providing tax breaks or direct cash subsidies to folks like biodiesel producers and race-track operators.
Meanwhile, the grandaddy of all expiring provisions goes largely unmentioned. Without new legislation, 24 million additional taxpayers will pay alternative minimum tax this year. That will happen because the AMT exemption for joint returns will fall from $70,950 to $45,000, and from $46,700 to $33,750 for single filers.
The AMT is a shadow tax system with fewer deductions and credits and a different rate schedule; it only applies when it gives a higher tax than the “regular” income tax. The reduction of regular tax rates in 2001 brought the regular and AMT brackets much closer, threatening to bring millions of voters into the AMT system. Congress has been passing “patches” to raise the AMT exemption for a year or two at a time since 2001 to avoid that. The last “patch” expired at the end of 2009.
An unpatched AMT would hit hardest taxpayers in the $100,000-$500,000 income range. Congress doesn’t want to anger that many potential campaign contributors. But where will Congress find the $68 billion or so of income that the AMT is budgeted to raise next year without a patch? The six month unemployment extension failed yesterday in the Senate because it would have increased the deficit by $34 billion.
So what will happen? Presumably an AMT patch will pass to appease voters as the election approaches, deficits be damned. Still, that’s not certain, especially in the current political environment.
So what can taxpayers do? They should start by projecting their tax for 2010. If you have one, your tax preparer is likely to have software to enable you to run the projection. If you use home tax software, it may also include a tax projection feature. Otherwise, you will have to use a 2009 copy of Form 6251, but using the reduced 2010 exemption amounts. Then you should fiddle with some items that affect AMT:
• The timing of your state and local tax payments.
• The timing of your miscellaneous itemized deductions.
• The timing of your capital gains, including capital losses.
Don’t be surprised if you find you have alternative minimum tax no matter what you do, especially if you live in a high-tax state. Then call your Congresscritter and ask for your patch.
Joe Kristan is a shareholder of Roth & Company, P.C. in Des Moines, Iowa, author of the Tax Update Blog and Going Concern contributor. You can see all of his posts for GC here.
Franken’s Monster: State Taxes for the Traveling Employee
He’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and doggone it, the state revenue departments loved Al Franken — once he paid $70,000 in back taxes.
Like many celebrities, Mr. Franken took his act on the road, making a good living on gigs in various states. Unlike many celebrities, Franken ran for office, subjecting his tax life to unnatural scrutiny. It turned out that he hadn’t filed taxes in every state wher
$70,000 of back taxes paid to 17 states later, Mr. Franken squeaked into the U.S. Senate by the narrowest of margins.
Franken has a lot of company in going from state to state without paying all of his taxes (he also has a lot of company in dumping on his accountant to weasel out of the blame). It’s a lot of work, and a lot of expense, for a traveling worker to pay taxes in every state. Every state has its own tax rules, and preparing all those returns isn’t cheap. Unfortunately, current law can make you taxable in a state with as little as one day of work.
State taxes are a compliance nighmare for glamour professions like sports, entertainment, construction and auditing. That’s why the Multistate Tax Commission is working on model legislation that would exempt workers from state taxes if they work in a state for less than 20 days in a year. That is, unless they work in sports, entertainment or construction (perhaps the only known instance where auditors aren’t abused worse than other professionals). A bill going nowhere in Congress, the Mobile Workforce State Income Tax Fairness and Simplification Act, would would create a 30-day threshold, but similarly screw entertainers and athletes, but not construction workers.
This raises the obvious question: why do they want to screw the athletes and entertainers? Presumably the states all want to pick Taylor Swift’s pocket (understandably), but for every Taylor Swift there are hundreds of struggling young musicians trying to scrape by and make a name for themselves. Yet the tax law, in all its majesty, requires the same level of tax compliance for millionairess Taylor Swift and the wonderful, but surely less prosperous, Carrie Rodriguez.
Small businesses used to be able to blow off states they only visited for a brief time. That’s becoming a bad bet. Better and cheaper data mining software makes it easier each year for state revenuers to sniff out temporary presence. If there is any publicity for your visit, you leave a Google trail. If you don’t file in a state, the statute of limitations never runs there, and you can build up a painful multi-year liability. If they catch you after the statute of limitations for your home state runs out, you lose your credit on the home state return for taxes paid in the other state — meaning you pay tax on the same income in two states.
So what do you do if you are a small business? Pay attention to which states you are doing business in. Don’t assume they just won’t notice you. Discuss things with your tax preparer. If you have sinned, most states will work out a deal through your preparer to only collect for a few years, and maybe waive penalties, if you come forward before they catch you. And remember that if you live in a high tax state, like California, New York or Iowa, you should be able to get an offsetting refund on your home state return for non-resident state taxes on an amended return for open years.
Joe Kristan is a shareholder of Roth & Company, P.C. in Des Moines, Iowa, author of the Tax Update Blog and Going Concern contributor. You can see all of his posts for GC here.
Tax Court: Don’t Bet Your Bass on Those Hobby Losses
One of the promised benefits of feminism was that both men and women would reap benefits from allowing women to achieve their potential in the workforce. And for Mr. Steve Lowe, it absolutely worked that way.
The Tax Court gives a hint at Mrs. Lowe’s achieved potential:
During the years at issue petitioner wife (Mrs. Lowe) worked full time as a “controller” for Fry Steel Co., where she has worked for over 38 years. She earned $177,219 and $184,181 in 2005 and 2006, respectively, with an additional $12,000 per year for taking notes at the board of directors meetings.
And how did that work out for Mr. Lowe?
In 2005 Mr. Lowe fi ts run by either American Bass, FLW Strem Series, or Western Outdoor News (WON) and reported gross income on petitioners’ Schedule C of $4,241. In 2006 Mr. Lowe fished in 15 tournaments run by those same organizations and reported $10,932 of gross income. The entry fees ranged from $280 to $825 with an additional $325 for a “coangler” amateur in FLW events.
Yes, Mrs. Lowe’s empowerment enabled her to hold down a fulfilling and well-paid job, freeing her husband to follow his dreams – to go fishing every day.
The only thing that could possibly be better than fishing every day while your wife brings home a nice paycheck is to get a tax deduction for fishing every day while your wife brings home a nice paycheck. And Mr. Lowe gave it a try, deducting $49,067 of fishing expenses in 2005. Unfortunately, he hooked a snag.
The tax law disallows losses from activities “not engaged in for profit” – the so-called “hobby loss” rules. The Tax Court summed it up (my emphasis):
Mrs. Lowe earned substantial income from her job at Fry Steel Co., and the losses from Mr. Lowe’s fishing activity resulted in substantial tax benefits. During the years at issue Mrs. Lowe earned an average of about $180,000 a year from her job, and petitioners were able to deduct an average of about $41,000 per year on their joint Federal income tax returns due to Mr. Lowe’s fishing activity losses. Mr. Lowe was not employed before the fishing activity and was able to pursue this activity because of Mrs. Lowe’s substantial income. We also note that Mr. Lowe fished for recreation and pleasure long before commencing his competitive bass fishing activity. He clearly enjoyed that activity and likely would have incurred significant fishing costs yearly for personal pleasure had he not conducted his claimed business activity.
The case illustrates some hobby loss red flags:
• The activity loses money and shows no sign of doing otherwise – It’s fishing, for heavens’s sake.
• The losses offset significant other income – If you would be getting the earned income credit otherwise, the IRS doesn’t invoke the hobby loss rules.
• The activity is fun – If your money-losing business can be perceived as fun – like fishing, say, or playing slots – it’s that much harder to convince the IRS that you’re really in it for profit. Remember, though, that even miserable activities (like selling Amway or writing blog posts) can run afoul of the hobby loss rules.
So Mr. Lowe lost his deductions. The Tax Court waived penalties, though, and Mr. Lowe, as far as we know, still can fish every day while his wife works. Millions of red-blooded men would take that deal, even without tax deductions.
Joe Kristan is a shareholder of Roth & Company, P.C. in Des Moines, Iowa, author of the Tax Update Blog and Going Concern contributor. You can see all of his posts for GC here.
Lazarus Was a Piker or: How the Extenders Bill Resurrects Bad Tax Provisions Year After Year
The Book of John says that Lazarus emerged from his tomb four days after his death. While impressive, Lazarus has nothing on the Section 41 Research Activities Tax Credit. While Lazarus is credited with only one extension, the Research Credit, first enacted in 1981 as a temporary measure, it has been extended at least 12 times — several times after it had expired.
If it’s such a wonderful tool for our economy, as its beneficiaries always say, and if it is y isn’t it just made permanent? There are two main reasons, one only slightly less cynical than the other.
First, the credit costs the government a lot of revenue. The one-year extension in H.R. 4213, the current “extender” bill, is scored as a $6.6 billion revenue-loser. By extending it only a year at a time, the Congresscritters disguise the real cost of the credit, which they have no intention of allowing to expire. Remember this phony accounting the next time some corporate shmoe trembles while Henry Waxman berates his accounting methods.
Even more cynical: it forces the lobbyists for the credit to pay tribute to their Congressional patrons every year to keep their pet corporate welfare provisions alive. A former Congressional staffer explains (my emphasis):
I never understood the “why” about expiring tax provisions until one very late night markup of the “extenders bill” several years ago while I was working for the Ways and Means Committee. Bleary-eyed, one of usually twinkly-eyed members plopped down in a chair next to me in back of the dais–just to take a little rest away from his member’s seat. I asked him “why do we have to do this every year?…why can’t we just pass these things permanently?”
His eyes suddenly twinkled again, as he looked at me with a combination of amusement and disbelief. He said: “Are you kidding me?… We couldn’t do that!… Why, I’d lose all my friends!…Who would come visit me and say kind things to me and do nice things for me then, if they didn’t have to come back every year to ask for these tax provisions?!!”
The research credit is just one of 70 or so “temporary” provisions included in this year’s omnibus “extender” bill. Other tax breaks critical to the continued robust functioning of the economy include the Indian employment tax credit, the special short depreciation life for qualified leasehold and restaurant improvements, subsidies for biodiesel, and the all-important “7-year recovery period for certain motorsports complexes.”
To “pay for” these “temporary” provisions, Congress each year reaches deeper into its bag of tricks for permanent tax increases. The chumps this year: private equity, hedge funds, and small professional corporations. When these things “expire” a year later, this year’s victims will continue to pay their higher tax without Congress having to pass another bill; they will be forgotten while Congress is busy looking for its next revenue fix. And like any junkie, it will give up the addiction only when it’s impossible to score.
Joe Kristan is a shareholder of Roth & Company, P.C. in Des Moines, Iowa, author of the Tax Update Blog and Going Concern contributor. You can see all of his posts for GC here.
S Corp Shareholders Are Going to Have Basis Issues at Year End – Four Things for Them to Keep in Mind
When somebody repays a loan, that’s not income to the lender, is it? It can be when a shareholder loans money to an S corporation. New York businessmen Ira and Sheldon Nathel learned that the hard way in court this week. Ira and Sheldon each owned shares in food distributors that were set up as S corporations. When you own an S corporation you may deduct corporate losses on your 1040, but only if you have basis in your S corporation stock or in loans you have made to the corporation (guarantees of corporate debt don’t work).
Yes, there’s a catch. When you take S corporation losses, they reduce your basis — first in your stock, then in your loans. Subsequent income, including tax-exempt income, restores your basis in your debt and r. If you repay a loan with reduced basis, you have taxable income to the extent the repayment exceeds your basis.
At the end of 2000, IRA and Sheldon each loaned $649,775 to one of their S corporations. That enabled them to take losses of $537,228 or so, leaving them with $112,547 in remaining loan basis. That would have been fine if they had waited patiently until S corporation income had restored their basis. Their patience ran out in February 2001, when they repaid the loan in full.
They may have had second thoughts. In August 2001 Ira and Sheldon each made a capital contribution to the S corporation — $537,228, coincidentally. They then took a novel position on their 2001 tax returns. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals takes up the story:
In calculating their 2001 taxes, the Nathels treated their capital contributions… as constituting “tax-exempt income” to the corporations for the purposes of § 1366(a)(1)(A). Therefore, because the Nathels’ bases in their stock previously had been reduced to zero and because their bases in the loans they made to the corporations were also reduced, the Nathels used their capital contributions to restore their bases in the loans pursuant to § 1367(b)(2)(B). Without such an increase in their bases, the petitioners would have been taxed on the ordinary income that would have resulted from the corporations’ repayment of the petitioners’ loans in amounts above the petitioners’ previously reduced bases.
The IRS didn’t buy the idea that a capital contribution was some sort of income. They said a capital contribution increases capital, not debt, and is allocable to stock basis. That meant $537,228 in ordinary taxable income. Unfortunately for Ira and Sheldon, the Tax Court, and now the Second Circuit, continue to recognize the capital/income distinction that has been around for approximately forever.
The economy being what it is (still crappy), lots of S corporation shareholder are going to have basis problems at year end. They should keep a few points in mind:
• Basis is necessary to deduct losses, but it isn’t sufficient – Your basis has to be “at-risk” and you have to clear the maze of the “passive loss” rules.
• Use caution when repaying loans – When you make a year-end loan to your S corporation to enable you to deduct losses, repaying the loan will trigger taxable income until the loan basis is restored by subsequent S corporation income.
• “Open account” loans can be tricky – Regulations split “open account” debt into separate “loans” when the loan amounts exceed $25,000. That means fluctuating open account balances during the tax year can lead to taxable income, even if the balance ends up higher at year end than it was at the start of the year.
• Related party issues – It’s dangerous to borrow from one S corporation you control and loan the funds to another one. The IRS likes to attack such loans as lacking substance.
So Ira and Sheldon get to write some big checks to the IRS. They have the consolation of having $537,228 more basis in their stock, to offset other income somewhere, somehow, someday.
Joe Kristan is a shareholder of Roth & Company, P.C. in Des Moines, Iowa, author of the Tax Update Blog and Going Concern contributor. You can see all of his posts for GC here.
Doing Penance for John Edwards’ Sins: Provision Could Hit “Skilled” S Corp Owners
Long before John Edwards became known as a well-coiffed skirt-chasing weasel, he was a well-coiffed successful trial lawyer. He was successful enough to afford good tax advice, so he conducted his law practice in an S corporation.
Back in the old days, professional practices were conducted as sole proprietorships or general partnerships, reportable as self-employment income, subject to the 15.3% self-employment tax up to the FICA base (currently $106,800), and to the 2.9% Medicare portion of the tax to infinity.
When state laws allowed professionals to incorporate, attorneys and accountants quickly noticed that income on S corporation K-1s is not subject to self-employment tax. This makes S corporations a popular way to run a professional practice. The professionals take a “reasonable” salary out of the business (subject to employer and employee FICA and Medicare tax) – enough to not raise IRS eyebrows – and take the rest out as S corporation distributions with no employment tax.
John Edwards did well by this. His law practice generated millions dollars of K-1 earnings in excess of his salary, saving him hundreds of thousands of dollars in payroll and self-employment tax.
Now that he has been reduced to a wealthy target of mockery, Congress is ready to crack down on the John Edwards S corporation tax shelter. The annual “extenders” bill has a provision – almost as absurd as Edwards love life – that will hit professional S corporation K-1 income with self-employment tax. The SE tax will apply when the “principal asset” of the S corporation is the “reputation and skill” of three or fewer professionals – defined for this purpose as “services in the fields of health, law, lobbying, engineering, architecture, accounting, actuarial science, performing arts, consulting, athletics, investment advice or management, or brokerage services.”
Congress doesn’t muss its hair worrying about how taxpayers in multi-owner S corporations are supposed to figure out whether its “principal asset” is the “reputation and skill” of three or fewer owners. However it works, this provision is too late to hurt John Edwards — his reputation isn’t much of an asset anymore.
Joe Kristan is a shareholder of Roth & Company, P.C. in Des Moines, Iowa, author of the Tax Update Blog and Going Concern contributor. You can see all of his posts for GC here.
One Diligent CPA Forced the IRS to Use a ‘Staggering’ Amount of Resources
Sure, NYU has produced lots of fancy-pants tax lawyers. And many high-powered big-school tax accountants haunt the cubicles of the Final Four accounting firms. But if driving the IRS to distraction is a mark of tax distinction, an obscure Kansas City attorney/CPA, formerly of Grant Thornton and Coopers and Lybrand, is a true tax all-star.
Or was. A federal judge this week made it inconvenient for GT alum Allen R. Davison to pursue his tax practice by enjoining him from marketing some of his most creative ideas:
Davison is hereby enjoined from organizing, establishing, promoting, selling, offering for sale or helping to organize, establish, promote, se any tax plan, as addressed herein, involving sham parallel C management companies, sham 412(i) plans, sham flock contracts or any other illegal tax scheme, plan, or device, even if not specifically addressed herein. Additionally, Davison shall not organize, establish, promote, sell, offer for sale or assist in any financial or tax related arrangement without submitting in writing to an IRS designee, a detailed plan explaining the financial or tax arrangement and all steps necessary for the arrangement to be legal under the tax code.
That would all be rather inconvenient for a practitioner. Why are the feds so down on Mr. Davison? From the injunction order:
Davison’s numerous, complex, ever-changing, tax-fraud schemes and his deliberate efforts to disguise his true involvement in the promotion of these tax-fraud schemes have required the IRS to expend a “staggering” amount of resources on discovering and combating these schemes. If this outlay of resources continues – and it almost certainly will continue in the absence of an injunction barring Davison from offering tax advice without significant restraint, then these resources will not be available to service honest tax paying Americans. Nor will these resources be available to investigate other promoters of tax-fraud schemes.
What were these “schemes”? Some of them used “management fees” to shift income from taxable businesses to sham S corporations owned by tax-exempt ESOPs or Roth IRAs. Others involved improper pension plans. But good old Midwestern farm ingenuity was behind what may be his most creative plan:
Davison drafts purported flock contracts for his clients. (Tr. 398:21-399:4). He argues that by executing these agreements, his clients become farmers, who are eligible to claim deductions for the cost of purchasing a flock of layer hens during the tax year in which that cost is incurred, pursuant to Revenue Ruling 60-191. (Tr. 412:10-20; PX 165). That revenue ruling provides “that farmers employing the cash method of accounting may deduct the cost of baby chicks and egg laying hens in the year of payment therefor, provided such method is consistently followed and clearly reflects income.”
The judge found that Mr. Davison has an overly-inclusive view of what “farming” means. The judge said that a guy with dirty boots who actually fed and raised chicks might be a farmer, but a “self-employed insurance salesman,” for example, who loaned money to a real farmer, did not.
There are many fascinating threads here, but let’s just hit three for now:
• Mr. Davison began selling many of these ideas while working for Grant Thornton, and according to the court order, marketed them through a network of CPA firms set up by GT alums. Networking pays!
• The elaborate system of preparer registration, testing and continuing education that IRS Commissioner Shulman is ramming through will spend enormous resources making honest and competent preparers jump through hoops; they would have done nothing to stop Mr. Davison. Shulman’s plan will spend money on driving honest preparers crazy with paperwork rather than chasing scammers.
• The cash-basis chicken flock technique that is outrageous for an insurance salesman is hunky-dory when done by a wealthy farmer. Because America Needs Farmers!
Joe Kristan is a shareholder of Roth & Company, P.C. in Des Moines, Iowa, author of the Tax Update Blog and Going Concern contributor. You can see all of his posts for GC here.
Closely-Held Corporations May Want to Take a Bullet Over the Pending Dividend Tax Hike
As a role model, Andrew Jackson has serious shortcomings, not least his penchant for genocide. But some of his policies are back in vogue, like the casual destruction of the national banking system. Taxpayers may be choosing to be like Andy in another way before the end of t had the bad fortune to get crossways with Charles Dickinson, one of the best pistol shots in Tennessee, when dueling was still fashionable. He met his antagonist across the state line in Kentucky, where duels were legal. Jackson was serious about this one, so he decided to take all the time he needed to do Dickinson in. Given Dickinson’s marksmanship, that meant accepting a bullet. Sure enough, Dickinson’s shot hit home:
The bullet struck him in the chest, where it shattered two ribs and settled in to stay, festering, for the next 39 years. Slowly he lifted his left arm and placed it across his coat front, teeth clenched. “Great God! Have I missed him?” cried Dickinson. Dismayed, he stepped back a pace and was ordered to return to stand on his mark.
Blood ran into our hero’s shoes. He raised his pistol and took aim. The hammer stuck at half cock. Coolly he drew it back, aimed again, and fired. Dickinson fell, the bullet having passed clear through him, and died shortly afterward.
Taxpayers owning C corporation stock might also want to take a bullet, figuratively speaking, this year. That’s because the tax rate on dividends will either leap or soar in 2011.
The increase in the dividend rate is a consequence of the scheduled expiration of the 2001 Bush tax cuts after this year. Prior to the Bush administration, dividends were taxed as ordinary income. As dividends are distributions of corporate income already taxed at a corporate rate as high as 35%, that meant a combined rate of 57.75%. The Bush tax cuts tied the dividend rate to the capital gain rate, now 15%.
When the Bush tax cuts expire, the capital gain rate is set to return to 20%. But without Congressional action, dividends will again be taxed as ordinary income. Given the size of the deficit, the poisonous election-year political atmosphere, and that the President promised to hold the dividend rate to 20%, it’s likely that dividends will be taxed as ordinary income in 2011. That would means a 164% increase the top dividend rate.
But wait, there’s more! Starting in 2013, Obamacare will tack another 3.8% to the top rate on investment income, resulting in a top dividend rate of of 43.4%, making the total tax increase over 189%.
This makes it tempting to take the bullet – a big 2010 dividend out of a closely-held C corporation. It will be especially attractive for shareholders who lack the ability to suck out corporate cash using the usual tricks of shareholder bonuses or rent payments.
Yes, it means taking a bullet. Taking dividends out of closely-held corporations breaks the rules of the C corporation tax planning crib book. Taxpayers go to elaborate lengths to avoid taking income before they have to. But a 189% tax increase might be enough to make some taxpayers take the bullet, like Andy, for the greater good.
When a Tax Time Bomb Goes Off: Repurcussions Await Some Small Nonprofits
At the end of the day on Monday, May 17, hundreds of thousands of little tax-exempt organizations will to turn into taxable little pumpkins. Under a provision of the Pension Protection Act of 2006, tax-exempt organizations that had been small enough to fall below IRS filing thresholds were required to start filing information reports. The law automatically revokes the exempt status of organizations that fail to file for three straight years. The deadline for that third year is May 17 for calendar-year filers.
Of course many of these organizations are inactive or defunct, but many aren’t. That means thousands of volunteer garden club, school parent organization and social club volunteer treasurers will unwittingly find themselves in charge of filing tax returns for their newly-taxable little corporations.
If you are an exempt organization treasurer or board member, you should find out right now whether your organization has filed. If your organization normally takes in less than $25,000 per year, the filing is a very simple on-line process, mostly just asking for identifying information. Bigger outfits will have to file a version of Form 990. If you need extra time, you can get a three-month extension on Form 8868. Some organizations, mostly governments and religious entities, are exempt from the filing and revocation rules.
But what will happen when these outfits lose their exempt status? They can ask for it back retroactively by filing Form 1023 or Form 1024 and paying a fee from $250 to $800. But many of these outfits will have no idea that they have lost their exempt status. What happens to them?
Most will become taxable C corporations or, in some cases, a taxable trust – depending on how they are set up. They will have income – for example, from contributions or dues – and they will be subject to normal Form 1120 filing requirements. If they fail to file, the normal kind and gentle penalties will accrue. Nobody really knows what the IRS will do about all of these little unwitting scofflaws.
And for what? Senator Charles Grassley explained back when the bill was passed in 2006:
The pension bill includes a good package of charitable giving incentives and loophole closers. It makes sense to tighten areas of abuse while increasing incentives for charitable giving. Americans are very generous with their donations. They deserve to know that their money helps the needy, not the greedy. Some individuals are creative about exploiting non-profits’ tax-exempt status for personal gain, and Congress has to be just as smart about shutting down abuse.
So take that, you greedy, abusive volunteer booster club treasurers! @ChuckGrassley has your number.
Start the Tax Day Party Without Me
Tonight will be the 26th tax day party of my accounting career. Pardon me if I don’t stick around very long.
The only really memorable tax day party was my first one. The tax group of the “Big 8” firm where my career started went to across the street to old Busch Stadium in St Louis, where the firm rented a box for the Cardinals baseball game. I happily drank their beer, only to be canned exactly a week later. That sort of took the fun out of the whole thing (though if I did something at the party to get fired from good old PW, it was the best career move I ever made).
So I found a job with the Des Moines tax group of another big firm. There the tax day party doubled as a bachelor party for one of the other staff accountants, and we all (well, the boy accountants) went to a north side strip club. I didn’t have any spare dollars for the garters, and I slipped away home, where I could drink all night for the cost of a single beer at the girlie club. But I just went to bed.
Which is really about all I feel like doing by the end of the day on April 15. By noon today I had already worked a 65-hour week. I’ve been in close company with my co-workers here from early morning to late night for weeks, and, as much as I love them to death, I’ve had enough quality time with them.
There are other awkward things about the tax parties. Like auditors. You can identify them by their animation and their golf tans – a sharp and annoying distinction from us dazed, pallid tax zombies. Bonus annoyance points if they come to the April 15 party straight from the golf course.
These parties typically occur at a local bar, where you run the high possibility of a colleague embarrassing himself in front of a client. Or worse, a drunk client hitting on one of our staff accountants. Worse still, a staff accountant hitting on a client. Unless it goes really well, of course.
Finally, I’m a boss now. Nobody really wants to do serious drinking in front of a boss. So now I’m like the old guys who used to start the Masters with a ceremonial tee shot. I’ll take a ceremonial shot (Templeton Rye, try it sometime), and then leave the field to the youngsters.
So have a good time tonight. If you see me out, I’ll be at dinner with my wife (I think I’m still married). I’ll be the one snoring.
Refundable Tax Credits: They’re for Trust Fund Babies Too!
So 47% of our nation’s households will pay no federal income tax this year. Well, stick it to those rich people, then! Help the deserving poor, like Buffy Richgirl.
Buffy is a struggling 26-year single mom with three kids and a checkered romantic history. Yet she does the best she can, earning $16,500 in various jobs in 2009 while taking courses in applied tattoology at the local college, while Mom helps with the kids.
Let’s see how a beneficent tax law helps this struggling mom make ends meet.
Some key facts:
Name: Buffy Richgirl.
Age: 26
Filing status: Head of Household, because of 3 dependent kids – Biff, Cloyd and Muffy.
Income: $16,500, all salary, no withholding.
Housing status: Daddy gave her $200,000 in 2008 to buy a house, which she bought in December 2009. She formerly lived in various apartments or with Daddy.
Educational status: She’s taking tattoo technology courses half-time at the local college (her Mom helps out with the kids), where she ran up $3500 in qualified expenses.
Prospects: She’s the beneficiary of a trust from late Grandpa that will kick out $5 million when she hits age 30, but which distributes nothing right now.
Other cash sources: She gets occasional non-taxable child support, and she has a non-interest bearing checking account with some Daddy cash.
The tax results? Adjusted Gross Income: $16,500. Taxable Income: $0. Taxes withheld and paid: $0. Tax refund: $17,009.
So how did our heroine double her income via her 1040? Through the miracle of “refundable credits” – tax credits that generate a refund even if your tax computes to zero. She wins with:
• An $8,000 First-time homebuyer credit.
• A $5,634 earned income credit.
• $2,025 in additional child credits
• $950 refundable education credit.
Don’t believe me? Look at her 1040 for yourself:
So what’s the point? It’s very hard to fine-tune the tax law. That’s especially true with refundable tax credits. No matter how carefully you try to “target” a group with tax benefits, there will be collateral unjust enrichment.
Now don’t you feel better about that check you have to send IRS next week?
Possible New Tax Forms Under Healthcare Reform
As we plod into the glistening new vistas of Obamacare, what sort of wonderful tax returns await us there?
The biggest change, one that will hit every 1040 from the simple 1040-EZ to the full-blown 1040 starting in 2014, will be the new “personal responsibility payment.” The PRP is the marketer’s name for a fine for not having an approved health insurance plan.
We’ve mentioned some of the weird enforcement problems this will bring – problems addressed in more technical detail here. The PRP can’t possibly work with rting – the individual numbers are just too small, and the IRS can’t audit everyone. If they are ever serious about this, there will have to be a new information reporting form issued by the health insurers, something like the 1098 form. The form will need to have the taxpayer’s social security number, and maybe some new number identifying the taxpayer’s IRS-approved health insurance plan. We’ll call this Form 1098-BCBS.
The 1040s will have a new form, or at least a new schedule – we’ll call it Schedule DRE. Schedule DRE will have a space to put the number from the 1098-BCBS, or lacking that, boxes to check for why you have failed to do your part to support health care in this great nation. If you don’t check the right boxes, there will be further lines to compute your PRP, which can range as high as 2% of your income. The final tax will carry to the taxes summary at the bottom of the second page of the 1040.
In the higher rent district, there will be new forms, or at least worksheets, to compute the two new Medicare taxes that apply starting in 2013. An additional .9% wage tax will apply to wages over $200,000 for single filers, $250,000 for joint returns, and $125,000 on married filing separate returns. While employers of single taxpayers who employ them all year will cover their tax through withholding, single job-switchers and married taxpayers will have to do this weird new computation on their 1040s somewhere. This one isn’t indexed for inflation, so we should all be there in a few years.
The wage tax computations will be childs play compared to the new 3.8% tax on “unearned income” – a phrase reeking of chutzpah, coming as it does from freaking Congress. This tax applies not only to old-fashioned investment income – interest, dividends and capital gains – but to royalties, rents, and to “passive” income from partnerships and S corporations. Auditing this tax may require all 16,000 of the new IRS agents called forth by Obamacare. “Passive” is defined here by the Sec. 469 rules, which were enacted to deal with tax shelter losses. Tax preparers will need to be very careful in distinguishing “passive” from “non-passive” income in many cases where it never used to matter.
IRS agents will have a field day trying to trip up folks who liked the income to be “passive” when it enabled them to use other losses. This will stimulate the economy of high-end tax consultants, who will quickly earn enough to qualify for the tax themselves, where they don’t already.
The unearned income tax tax will apply to the lesser of “unearned income” or the amount adjusted gross income exceeds $200,000 for single filers, $250,000 on joint returns ($125,000 on separate returns). So a new form will have to add up the “unearned” income from Schedule B, Schedule D, Schedule E, and maybe Schedule F, and compute the tax, which will also carry to the nether regions of Schedule 1040, page 2.
There will be plenty of other changes applying to 1040s between now and whenever Obamacare fully kicks in. There is a nice timetable here.
The IRS isn’t waiting to prepare to enforce these new rules. Going Concern has obtained an exclusive early draft of Schedule DRE.
The IRS Will Enforce Mandatory Healthcare Using the Honor System
How much tax would you pay on April 15 if the IRS couldn’t levy on your bank account, slap you with a lien, charge you penalties and interest, or send you to jail? Not much, eh? Then ponder the rules forcing individuals to buy “minimum essential coverage” under Obamacare.
The forced purchase of insurance is key to Obamacare. The “personal responsibility requirement” – a funny name for a requirement imposed by the state – is needed to make sure that low-risk individuals buy insurance to help keep it affordable for high-risk buyers (or, less politely, healthy young men are forced to subsidize everybody else). The penalty is considered vital to any semblance of fiscal soundness for the program. The rule is backed up by penalties and will be collected on tax returns.
The reaction of healthy young men in 2014 when this penalty kicks in will be “Dude. You’re not serious.”
And they will be right.
Caleb noted this yesterday from the Joint Committee of Taxation explanation of the penalties (my emphasis):
The penalty is assessed through the Code and accounted for as an additional amount of Federal tax owed. However, it is not subject to the enforcement provisions of subtitle F of the Code. The use of liens and seizures otherwise authorized for collection of taxes does not apply to the collection of this penalty. Non-compliance with the personal responsibility requirement to have health coverage is not subject to criminal or civil penalties under the Code and interest does not accrue for failure to pay such assessments in a timely manner.
If we take them at their word – and new Code Sec.5000A(g)(2) seems to say just this – why would any sensible taxpayer ever pay the penalty?
• They can’t threaten you with jail.
• They can’t hit you with a lien.
• They can’t levy your accounts.
• There’s no interest charge, so even if you do pay it late somehow, you’ve had the interest in the meantime.
We tax preparers probably won’t be allowed to recommend non-payments to our clients, or we will be silenced by our new IRS preparer enforcement overlords, but people will figure it out in a hurry. And if you think that people will pay taxes anyway without the threat of collection, penalties or interest, then why are we wasting any money funding the IRS?
This provision means one of two things: either this penalty is a joke, and they are just kidding about the cost estimates of the bill — they will be much, much higher — or the toothless penalties are just a PR stunt that they plan to correct as soon as they can get away with it.
The Latest Homebuyer Tax Credit Scam: Now with HUD!
That the First-time Homebuyers Credit is riddled with fraud is old news. Like all refundable credits, where the government writes you a check if the credit exceeds the tax shown on your return, it’s a magnet for grifters. What’s new is cross-agency efforts enable First-Time Homebuyer Credit fraud, with video.
James O’Keefe, notorious for donning pimpwear and taping ACORN officials happily facilitating tax fraud and child prostitution, and then for getting arrested in Louisiana, took his act to Detroit and Chicago offices of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development posing as a tax credit scammer. One conversation went like this:
The law says that the tax credit maxes out at $8,000 for an $80,000 home. On the tape, O’Keefe asked a staffer, “What if I bought a place for $50,000, but the seller and I agreed to write down $80,000 as the purchase price?”
“Flip it any way you want,” the staffer replied.
What if the place is worth much less — like only $6,000?
“Yup, you can do that.”
This version of the Homebuyer Credit scam can get around the checks the IRS has in place to prevent fraud. The primary IRS anti-fraud check for the homebuyer credit is a requirement that a copy of an HUD-1 form or settlement statement be attached to the 1040 claiming the credit. If the buyer and seller collude to dummy up a HUD-1 form, the “buyer” is reasonably likely to get the credit as long as there isn’t some other item on the return that flags it – such as an address that’s different from the one for the “home” on the settlement statement.
The scammers wouldn’t be out of the woods by any means. The IRS might well catch up with the scammers. But then again, they might not, or if they did, the money could be long gone. For someone living in in a Detroit neighborhood where houses sell for as little as $1,000, splitting $8,000 with a scammer might be one of the less-risky opportunities at hand.
Give It Up Tax Protesters, You’re Just Screwing Yourselves
Of the adherents of strange and puzzling belief systems – 9/11 Truthers, Fed groupies, Cubs fans – few work so hard to screw themselves as tax protesters.
By their own account, t www.rothcpa.com/archives/000480.php”>spend “thousands of hours” reading their arcane tracts, expanding on theories of why the 16th Amendment is a figment of our imagination, or why a gold-fringed flag means you’re in an admiralty court, which somehow undoes the income tax.
Or why the federal tax law only covers the District of Columbia and federal forts, or why Section 861 says U.S. source income isn’t taxable. The result? They still owe the taxes, penalties, and maybe $25,000 idiot fees from the tax court – and that’s if things go well. If they go badly, they go very badly.
Every year the IRS updates its handy debunking of tax protester arguments. It does little good. You can spend hours trying to talk tax protesters out of their ideas, but they move effortlessly from one gold-fringed bad idea to another, and they can almost sound like they make sense, until you get outside and get some fresh air. But there is one common problem in all of these “Tax Honesty” arguments: they don’t work.
No matter how convinced you are that Irwin Schiff’s theories of the income tax are true, that there is no income tax, all of the federal judges think there is one. So does the IRS, the Federal Marshals Service, and pretty much everyone in the Bureau of Prisons. What they say trumps what Irwin says, which is why the poor man is likely to die in jail.
But what about the glorious courtroom triumphs of Lloyd Long, Vernice Kuglin and Tom Cryer? They were acquitted by juries! Yes, these guys beat criminal charges. Why the juries voted the way they did, we’ll never really know. Maybe they were nullifiers, striking a blow against the income tax. Maybe they decided that the defendants really believed their schtick, so they didn’t “willfully” fail to pay their taxes. But these acquittals debunk the income tax only if the O.J. acquittal debunks California’s murder statute. Even though these guys didn’t go to jail (unlike many, including their pied piper, Irwin Schiff), they still have to pay their taxes.
Maybe you’re reading this and thinking “Of course he says that. He does taxes for a living. He’s in on the conspiracy!” If so, come on. If this stuff actually worked, I wouldn’t grind my way through every tax season pretending there is an income tax. If it worked, I would just talk to a few of my wealthiest clients, work out a deal to take 5% of their income for the next 10 years in return for making their taxes go away, wave my wand, and spend March in Mesa.
But here I am, grinding out those returns. That no more makes me “pro-tax” than believing in germ theory makes a doctor “pro-bacteria.” Still, if you really want to ruin your financial life, you’re welcome to choose your poison. But first ask yourself: are all of these big companies and rich guys who pay taxes crazy or stupid? Or is it just you?
L.A. Dodgers Owners Use Loss Carryforwards; So Now They’re Tax Cheats?
Stipulated: the L.A. Dodgers are evil. Not seventh-circle evil like the Mets or the White Sox, but evil enough. And we’ll assume, for sake of argument, that their owner, Frank McCourt, bathes in Kruggerands while sipping puppies blended with 50-year old single-malt scotch.
That still doesn’t make him a tax cheat.
So why this lame L.A. Times column from Frank Hiltzik?
To everyone who claims that our wealthiest citizens pay more than their fair share of income taxes and we should cu se they’re the ones who, you know, create jobs in our economy, I have four words for you:
The McCourts, who own the Los Angeles Dodgers (so she says; he says he’s the owner and she’s not), jointly pocketed income totaling $108 million from 2004 through 2009, according to documents Jamie McCourt recently filed in the couple’s divorce case in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
On that sum, they paid zero federal and state income tax.
They made $108 million and paid no federal income tax? Why might that be?
According to Jamie, the McCourts employed two mechanisms to live tax-free. One was to claim enormous tax losses from their business, which was mostly commercial real estate before they bought the Dodgers. These could be carried forward, offsetting income year after year until they were finally netted out.
So let’s get this straight: they made $108 million by losing $109 million? It must be magic! No?
“…Jamie’s accountant states in a court document that some is due to depreciation, which is a way of accounting for wear and tear on a property.”
So real estate losses are non-cash funny money? The tax law stretches commercial real estate deductions out over 39 years now, so real estate isn’t a great tax shelter. Sure, you can deduct commercial mortgage interest, but you can’t deduct principal on mortgage payments. So even in real estate, the McCourts’ $130 million tax loss carryforward isn’t a symptom of prosperity.
Let’s consider another exotic possibility: maybe they really lost money. Mr. McCourt’s day job is in commercial real estate. How has that been doing lately?
But Hiltzik seems to think tax loss carryforwards are some kind of cheaters game, or maybe even a status symbol, like a Mercedes or a private jet:
“Jamie’s documents say that in 2008 the net loss carry-forward from previous years was $109 million — in other words, the McCourts could have earned that much without paying a penny of income tax.”
Imagine of a world without loss carryforwards (I think you can!). You start a business and you lose $2 million in Year 1. In Year 2 things turn around and you make back $1 million. Without loss carryforwards, as a 35%-rate taxpayer you would pay $350,000 in Year two, even though the business is still $1 million in the hole. That’s an effective rate of >infinity%.
Perhaps Mr. McCourt is prosperous in spite of his loss carryforwards. Maybe his real estate has held its value, unlike everybody else’s. Maybe he’s even running personal expenses through his business (though Leona Helmsley learned that the IRS looks for that). But even a Los Angeles real estate empire can suddenly come crashing down.
Remember that maybe, just maybe, Mr. McCourt’s soon-to-be-ex-wife has a vested interest in making him look prosperous, and in making losses look like a mark of wealth. She might like some of that.
[H/t: TaxProf Blog]
Joseph Stack Was Not the First Violent Tax Protester…and He Won’t Be the Last
While the apparent kamikaze raid on the Austin IRS offices yesterday may be the first air assault on an IRS office, it’s not the first time somebody on the wrong end of the tax law attempted an entirely stupid and futile gesture of violent tax resistance.
Take Minnesota computer entrepreneur Robert Beale. Rather than showing up for his tax trial, he hit the road and spent 14 months on the run. When in jail awaiting his rescheduled trial, he arranged a “common law court” of associates to “arrest” his judge. He unwisely made these arrangements through a wired prison phone, and got an extra 11 years in prison for his trouble. He had a solution for that, too, telling his sentencing judge: “’I do not consent to incarceration, fine or supervised release,’ he said. ‘I have not committed a crime.’” Amazingly, convict consent is not required in the Federal prison system, and Mr. Beale is currently residing in Yazoo City, Mississippi.
A Florida contractor, Randy Nowak, chose a different path. In 2008, he was concerned that an IRS agent was closing in on offshore bank accounts. As the IRS offshore amnesty wasn’t yet up and running, he attempted to hire out the murder of the IRS agent. For good measure, he wanted to burn down the local IRS office. He met with a mean looking 6-4 biker nicknamed “The Reaper” to arrange the work. Plans went awry when “The Reaper” turned out to be an undercover FBI agent wearing a wire. Mr. Nowak had an explanation:
Nowak’s attorney argued that his client was actually afraid of the biker and that a friend had gotten him unwittingly involved in the plot. His lawyer pointed to a number of phone calls between Nowak and his friend, who secretly alerted the authorities to the plot. The attorney claimed that Nowak had been trying to persuade his friend to call off the hit, but the friend warned him against angering the gang.
The jury didn’t buy it, and Mr. Nowak received a 30 year sentence. Still, he is only in his early 50s, so he has more to look forward to than 67 year-old Ed Brown. When Mr. Brown’s trial on tax charges seemed to be going badly, he retreated to a fortress-like New Hampshire homestead filled with food and ammo and surrounded by booby traps. He held out for months until he was captured by U.S. Marshals posing as sympathizers. He will begin his 37-year sentence on federal weapons charges when he completes his 63-month tax sentence. He is scheduled for release in 2044, when he will be about 111 years old.
The Austin Kamikaze’s plans did sort of resolve his tax problems, but at a price beyond what most people with tax problems are ready to pay.
What Are Your Taxes Buying Hollywood?
The former head of the Iowa Film Office was charged this week with “unfelonious misconduct in office” for his role in a scandal in which filmmakers bought themselves everything from featherbeds to Benzes with money advanced by the taxpayers of Iowa.
The Hawkeye State fell big time for the film credit fad that swept the country in recent years. Iowa had two 25% tax credits, one for filmmakers and one for investors. As interpreted by Mr. Wheeler (but not the Attorney General), the credits together could add up to 50% of film costs incurred in state, making it perhaps the most generous such giveaway in the country.
Better yet, the credits are transferable, so filmmakers can sell them at a discount to raise money. The program had no caps, meaning that Iowa could give away money as fast as Hollywood could spend it.
The entire program was managed by Mr. Wheeler, almost by himself. And did he ever manage it. According to the Iowa Attorney General:
Defendant Wheeler permitted filmmakers… to utilize “payments in kind” including “services in kind” in support of claimed expenditures for tax credits. Under defendant Wheeler’s direction, Iowa’s film program became one of the few, if not the only, state film incentive program in the nation to allow credit for “services in kind.”…Examples included “sponsorship agreements” in which intangible assets (such as reciprocal web links, product placement and marketing agreements) were traded with no money changing hands. These non-cash “expenditures” sometimes constituted the majority of the filmmakers entire alleged budget.
For a brief glitzy moment, Iowa was overrun with film crews and starlets helping themselves to a bountiful harvest.
The party ended last fall with revelations that Iowans helped buy a Mercedes and a Land Rover for a producer via film credits. Mr. Wheeler lost his job, and now he stands charged with a “serious misdemeanor.” Two filmmakers are charged with felony theft for inflating their expenses while claiming credits.
But if Mr. Wheeler is criminally inept, what about the bosses that left him alone and unsupervised to give away over $30 million so far? And what about the 147 legislators — out of 150 — who thought it would be a good idea to give Hollywood a blank check? And you thought “Music Man” was fiction.
But lest you think too badly about the rubes in Iowa, forty-four states are giving taxpayer money to Hollywood. Chances are that your legislator is taking money from you and giving it to those nice Hollywood people. Remember that next time your legislator says you aren’t paying enough taxes.
Sex Change Expenses Are Deductible but You’re on Your Own for the C Cup
He seemed to have it all — a wife, three kids, a successful career. But it wasn’t enough. What he really wanted was another X chromosome. Our taxpayer, explains the Tax Court, “was uncomfortable in the male gender role from childhood and first wore women’s clothing secretly around age 10…discomfort regarding her gender intensified in adolescence…[The taxpayer] was a female trapped in a male body, and continued to secretly wear women’s clothing.”
So our taxpayer consulted a licensed social worker, which is apparently how these things are done, and after suitable counseling, decided to try on XX for size. The first steps down the path the the Misses Department seemed to suit the taxpayer, so he took the next big leap. $21,741 of surgical and related expenses later, the taxpayer was Ms. Rhiannon O’Donnabhain.
The Tax Court got involved when she deducted these expenses on her 2001 tax return. The IRS said that the expenses were not “medical” expenses under Sec. 219. It would be an unusual man who would undergo this sort of thing absent dire medical need: “The procedures that Dr. Meltzer carried out included surgical removal of the penis and testicles and creation of a vaginal space using genital skin and tissue.”
It took 139 pages and 4 separate opinions, but the Tax Court agreed that the gender reassignment surgery is a deductible medical expense. It’s surprising that it was so difficult, considering that the court is largely composed of men who wear dresses at work. But they felt it was necessary to go into the sort of privacy-killing detail that makes taxpayers think twice before spurning an appeals offer and going to Tax Court (oh, you mean you’re that Rhiannon O’Donnabhain!):
Petitioner, anticipating the formal recommendations for her surgery, went for a consultation and examination by Dr. Meltzer in June 2001 at his offices in Portland, Oregon. Dr. Meltzer concluded that petitioner was a good candidate for sex reassignment surgery. Dr. Meltzer’s notes of his physical examination of petitioner state: “Examination of her breasts reveal [sic] approximately B cup breasts with a very nice shape.”
Nice enough for government work, anyway. The Court ruled that while the hormone therapy, vaginoplasty, feminizing facial surgery and penis and testicle removal were deductible, breast augmentation was, well, too much:
given the contemporaneous documentation of the breasts’ apparent normalcy and the failure to adhere to the Benjamin standards’ requirement to document breast-engendered anxiety to justify the surgery, we find that petitioner’s breast augmentation surgery did not fall within the treatment protocol… Instead, the surgery merely improved her appearance.
So if the Tax Court’s view holds up on appeal, you can deduct the cost of changing sides, but if that’s not enough to make you sufficiently hot, you’re on your own.
Tax Court: “…religious, charitable, scientific…literary, or educational purposes…” Doesn’t Mean “Sex with Kids.”
Private charitable efforts are as American as can be. Toqueville noted our vigorous civil society back in the early days:
Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society.
The tax law recognizes this all-American tendency in Sec. 501(c)(3), which grants a tax exemption for associations with the proper purpose, like those in the headlines.
So along comes Eddie C. Risdal from Iowa. Eddie wanted tax exemption for a cause dear to his heart, “Mysteryboy Incorporation”:
MENBERS SHALL NOT PROMOOT, BUT WILL NOT DENY THE FACT OF PAST & PRESENT HUMAN HISTORY THAT HUMANKIND FROM YOUTH ON-THROUGH ADULTHOOD HAS IN MAJORITY BEEN SEXUAL ACTIVE WHETHER BE IN PROMISIOUS, DEVENTCY, OR EXPERIMENTATION SEXUAL ACTS, AND MENBERS WILL PROMOOT SAFE SEX EDUCATION AND SAY NO TO ILLEGAL DRUGS USES UNTIL THE EVENT THAT THEY BECOME LEGALIZED, MENBERS WILL PROMOOT FEED THE HUNGARY, SUEICIDE PREVENTION AND ANY AMENDED PROGRAMS AS THE INCORPORATION FINDS SUCH A PUBLIC NEED TO ADD SUCH PROGRAMS THAT WILL BENEFIT SOCIETY AT LARGE.
The IRS somehow found this suspicious and asked a few more questions. They came to this conclusion:
The facts of this case show that Mysteryboy Incorporation was organized and operating primarily for influencing a change in the laws concerning sexual exploitation of children.
The Tax Court found that cause a bit too close to Eddie’s heart (my emphasis):
The activities in which petitioner proposes to engage seek to decriminalize the type of behavior (1) for which Mr. Risdal, petitioner’s founder, sole director, sole officer, and executive director, was convicted and incarcerated and (2) which formed the basis for his having been adjudicated a sexually violent predator subject to civil commitment under Iowa Code Ann. ch. 229A (West 2006).10 On the record before us, we find that petitioner has failed to show that those activities will not provide Mr. Risdal with a platform from which he will seek to legitimize the illegal behaviors in which he has engaged, for which he was convicted, and which formed the basis on which he is civilly committed under the laws of the State of Iowa. On that record, we find that petitioner has failed to carry its burden of establishing that its proposed activities will not further the private interests of Mr. Risdal in violation of section 501(c)(3) and the regulations thereunder.
The moral? Civil society ends where civil commitment begins.
Cite: Mysteryboy Incorporation v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo 2010-13.
Joe Kristan is a tax shareholder for Roth & Company, a Des Moines, Iowa CPA firm, where he works with closely-held businesses and their owners. Prior to helping start Roth & Company, he worked for two of what are now the Final Four CPA firms. He writes the Tax Update Blog and is available for seminars, first communions, Bar Mitzvahs, etc. You can see all his posts for GC here.
SHOCKER: People Make Mistakes Preparing Tax Returns
When the “Government Accountability Office” reported that 68 percent of S corporation returns had errors, a few people who don’t prepare returns for a living were astonished:
By the way, these S Corporation shareholders are mostly comprised of the “small businessmen” that the right-wing anti-tax crowd constantly claims is overtaxed. Hmmmm. Looks like the bigger issue with this group is noncompliance, not overtaxation. We need to increase enforcement efforts, especially focused on the particular items that have tended to be misreported in S corporation returns.
The reaction from tax pros is more like, “you mean 32% of S corporation returns have no activity?”
Breaking news: this stuff is hard. The tax return for an S corporation of any size starts with thousands of transactions that have to be properly recorded – thousands of opportunities for mistakes. Then you start to apply the tax law. You have to find all of the meals and entertainment expenses, and you have to see which ones fail to qualify. Did the S corporation properly include health insurance on the W-2s (probably not)? What about for the owner’s nephew who has a job at the loading dock? Did every fixed asset get capitalized properly? What about the expenses of acquiring it? Can Section 179 apply? Is it new equipment that qualifies for the bonus depreciation rules? Oh, did they apply the Section 263A inventory capitalization rules properly? Did the Section 199 information get properly recorded for all of the shareholders? Interest? Dividends? Are they qualifying dividends? Are there Capital gains? Section 1231 gains – and what about unrecognized Section 1250 gain? Oh, don’t double them up – that Section 1250 number is part of that 1231 number, not an addition to it!
You get the picture. And if you have a multistate return, your fun is just beginning.
Once you think you have taxable income right, then you have to apply it correctly to the K-1 for the shareholders. Then the shareholders have to apply it correctly to their own tax return, even though the IRS-designed K-1 omits crucial information that the taxpayer or his preparer needs – the shareholder’s basis in the tax return, whether the taxpayer is “at-risk” for basis, and the level of the taxpayers involvement in the business.
If 32% of the returns are reported correctly, it’s shocking all right – it’s amazing that so many are
correct. I’d like to see some law professor, or Congresscritter, try do a tough 1120-S perfectly on a deadline and a budget.
Anybody who has prepared returns for very long has had a “doh!” moment along the way – “holy crap, I’ve been doing that wrong!” It’s not because tax preparers or taxpayers are lazy or evil. It’s just hard.
Joe Kristan is a tax shareholder for Roth & Company, a Des Moines, Iowa CPA firm, where he works with closely-held businesses and their owners. Prior to helping start Roth & Company, he worked for two of what are now the Final Four CPA firms. He writes the Tax Update Blog and is available for seminars, first communions, Bar Mitzvahs, etc. You can see his previous posts for GC here.
You Don’t Like the Way I Prepared Your Return? Take Two Tylenol and Call Me in the Morning.
Editor’s note: Joe Kristan is a tax shareholder for Roth & Company, a Des Moines, Iowa CPA firm, where he works with closely-held businesses and their owners. Prior to helping start Roth & Company, he worked for two of what are now the Final Four CPA firms. He writes the Tax Update Blog and is available for seminars, first communions, Bar Mitzvahs, etc. You can see his previous posts for GC here.
While the IRS is cracking down on tax preparers and proposing new rules to herd them into submission compliance, problem preparers aren’t a new problem.
Back in 1982, when the 1986 Code was just a gleam in Dan Rostenkowski’s eye, the nation’s headaches went untreated when people started dying from cyanide-tainted Tylenol. We still live with the hard-to-open containers for almost everything as a legacy of the murder spree. The killer has never been nabbed, but the tax world has supplied one suspect. The Chicago Tribune reports:
James William Lewis, a longtime suspect in the 1982 Tylenol murders, made a rare public appearance on public access television near Boston on Sunday night, hoping to promote his new self-published novel, “Poison! The Doctor’s Dilemma.”
Instead, Lewis was met with a barrage of questions from the show’s host and callers about whether he had a role in the unsolved cyanide poisonings that left seven Chicago-area residents dead, and if his novel had anything to do with the killings.
Why the suspicion?
Lewis said during the 48-minute interview that he regretted having written Tylenol’s manufacturer after the deaths, demanding $1 million to “stop the killing,” for which he was convicted of extortion.
A mistake anybody could make, especially after things have gone bad in your tax practice:
After his extortion conviction in 1983, Lewis served more than 12 years in prison. In the 1970s, Lewis was accused in Kansas City, Mo., of killing and dismembering a client of his tax-preparation business. Charges were dropped after a judge threw out most of the evidence.
That just shows how the new preparer regulations are long overdue. We can be confident that IRS Commissioner Shulman’s new preparer registration and CPE requirements — especially the two annual “ethics” hours — will keep anything like that from ever happening to a preparer today.
The Winners and Losers in the New Tax Preparer Requirements
Having mastered all of its other responsibilities, the IRS was getting restless. Seeking a new challenge, they are now going to run a testing and continuing education bureaucracy for unenrolled preparers.
When a bureaucracy takes on a new role, the smart question to ask is: who wins?
The big franchised tax preparers are the biggest winners &R Block, Jackson Hewitt and Liberty Tax will now get to put little neon signs saying “IRS Licensed” in their windows. Yes, they will have to take on some responsibility in administering continuing education and employee testing, but they will be able to spread that cost across a nationwide business. They will find ways to streamline things so their employees will miraculously achieve government-approved competence with amazingly little effort. And they will be able to afford fixers and lobbyists to unravel any glitches that happen in the IRS preparer bureau.
This process isn’t just hypothetical. It is just another variation of what happened in the accounting industry after Sarbanes-Oxley and PCAOB. Smaller firms who would take on small public companies before PCAOB could no longer justify the regulatory costs, and the public companies are now captive clients of the big firms.
Over time, the IRS regulatory function will undergo the inevitable process of regulatory capture by the big players. The result – regulations that don’t much bother them but which make life difficult or impossible for their little competitors.
Fixers and lobbyists – See above.
Congresscritters and their staffs – Especially those on tax writing committees. Their new friends Henry, Robert, Jackson and Hewitt will enrich their PACs and make sure that the needs of their new overlords are attended to.
IRS staffers – Once public service palls, the bureaucrats who oversee the programs will have cushy new homes awaiting them at the franchised tax shops.
When there are winners, there are losers. These include:
Small tax prep shops – A solo practitioner will have to manage the new bureaucracy alone, while his giant competitors will have full-time fixers. When a little guy’s competency exam gets lost by the IRS bureaucracy, he might lose a season’s worth of business; fixers and lobbyists will make sure nothing like that happens to the big boys. And of course the inevitable capture of the IRS bureaucracy by the big players will continue to squeeze the little guys.
Enrolled Agents – Now that the IRS will be creating a new lesser level of licensing, these professionals will have a harder time distinguishing their much higher standards to a confused public.
Consumers – The most obvious result will be an increase in prices, both to pay for the new compliance costs and because the rules will run smaller preparers out of the market. Supporters of the regulations will say that it will be worth it because the new standards will improve quality. That’s a pipe dream. A bozo test and a few hours of CPE won’t turn a quack into a brain surgeon.
Low income consumers will, of course, not have to pay for the fancy “licensed” preparers. There will still be plenty of folks with pirated copies of Turbotax preparing unsigned returns in their cars and apartments, and the higher prices of the licensed competitors will send them more business. Other consumers will either struggle through their own returns without benefit of CPE or drop out of the tax system entirely.
So what would be a better approach? – The real problem is Congress. A simple tax law without fraud-inviting refundable credits wouldn’t have preparer problems. At the very least, we should require Congresscritters to face the consequences of their own work. Every one of them should be required to prepare their returns themselves in a live (and archived) webcast. If they use software, their screens should be visible on the webcast. What about their privacy? They make us give them all of our personal information, so fair is fair.
Editor’s note: Joe Kristan is a tax shareholder for Roth & Company, a Des Moines, Iowa CPA firm, where he works with closely-held businesses and their owners. Prior to helping start Roth & Company, he worked for two of what are now the Final Four CPA firms. He writes the Tax Update Blog and is available for seminars, first communions, Bar Mitzvahs, etc. You can see his debut post for GC here.
Section 409A: Worst Tax Enactment of the Decade
Editor’s note: Welcome to GC’s first edition of “Taxes: Because We’re the Little People” by Joe Kristan. Joe Kristan is a tax shareholder for Roth & Company, a Des Moines, Iowa CPA firm, where he works with closely-held businesses and their owners. Prior to helping start Roth & Company, he worked for two of what are now the Final Four CPA firms. He writes the Tax Update Blog and is available for seminars, first communions, Bar Mitzvahs, etc.
Sure, those Northwest pilots who missed Minnesota were off the mark. So was Arthur when he signed off on the Enron audit. But as badly as they missed the target, they look like Annie Oakley compared to Congress in its response to Enron.
Congress takes aim at the national firms whose audits failed to spot the looting at places like Enron. The result? SarBox, the greatest gravy train for the Final Four firms since the invention of the senior accountant.
The Congressional response on the tax side took a different approach. Rather than reward the guilty, they chose to beat the innocent. Hence Section 409A.
The Enron scandal featured elaborate deferred compensation plans to provide executives a gilded liferaft when the ship sinks. Congress responds with a code section affecting schoolteachers. They showed Ken Lay what for by designing a tax on folks on money they may never see because of somebody else’s foot fault.
Sec. 409A clobbers its victims two ways:
• It taxes employees on their deferred comp balances when the plan is out of compliance, even if the employee doesn’t get the money, ever.
• It hits them again with a 20% excise tax.
Worse, the code section imposing these penalties is so complicated that it took 3 years to complete the regulations that run to 200 pages, and are so complicated and intrusive that accidental noncompliance must be rampant.
This all makes Sec. 409A my choice as the worst tax enactment of the decade. But tastes differ. Let us know your nominee for the worst tax provision enacted from 2000 through 2009 in the comments and if we get some good submissions, we’ll put it to a vote.