It involves a grown man in a diaper.
Brass Taxes [via Jezebel]
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(UPDATE) Bernie Sanders Is Getting His Filibuster On
NPR reports that the Vermont Senator has been going for over 90 minutes to delay the vote on the tax deal President Obama made with Republicans and judging by the live feed from CSPAN2, he’s not showing any sign of stopping. NPR quotes Berns:
“You can call what I am doing today whatever you want, you it call it a filibuster, you can call it a very long speech. I’m not here to set any great records or to make a spectacle. I am simply here today to take as long as I can to explain to the American people the fact that we have got to do a lot better than this agreement provides.”
Here’s a snip from feed the (a pie chart!):
And a bar chart!
He’s doing you proud Green Mountain Staters!
UPDATE: Entering hour six! It’s like he’s got an IV of pure Green Mountain joe!
Man Who Would Have Unenviable Task of Overseeing Implementation of New Tax Law Changes at IRS Will Have Confirmation Hearing This Week
That man is Beverly Hills, Calif., tax attorney and member of the Academy of Magical […]
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.