If you read my stuff I really appreciate it.  And I hope you like it.  I care about whether you like it.  To be honest though I don’t care that much.  There are really only four people that I care a lot about whether they like my writing.  One of them is at Forbes.com and another is at Think Outside The Tax Box.  Of course I only care if they like the stuff I send them for their respective publications,

 

Then there is me.  You know you have to do something to feed your family and you don’t have to like it, although it does make your life more pleasant if you do.  Writing never has been and likely never will be how I feed myself or anybody else.  So there is no point if I don’t like the result.

 

That’s three.  If my life partner read my stuff I would probably care whether she liked it at least a little.  But she prefers novels.  So who is the fourth person whose opinion I value?  That would be William Reilly.  William is my son and I am very pleased with the sort of person he has turned out to be.  He is kind and compassionate and thoughtful.  William studied creative writing at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and has an MFA from the University of Alabama.  So he is much more literary than I am, but the pressures of establishing himself in the dystopian economy that my generation is leaving in our wake have prevented him from doing a lot of writing.

 

Anyway for Christmas, I asked him to write something that I could publish here.  And he chose to do a review of my 2021 production.  So here we have an evaluation from someone who is decidedly not a tax geek on YTMP’s 2021 output – PJR

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I appreciate my father. I even appreciate taxes in that I think that given a chance they can sew the class divide. I have done some work on this blog and Peter’s other blogs since their inception. I have close to thirty years experience of half-listening to a very passionate accountant – however I do not think of myself as qualified to write a post here, or to even decide which of these posts were the “best” of their month. What I hope you’ll get out of my picks are the topics I, someone who tries to not think about taxes very often, find interesting, and maybe they are things that people like you, readers travelling into a far corner of the Tax Blogosphere, can talk to normal people about.

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The IRS assigns tax debt to private collectors? Those companies whose number my phone will tell me is a scam caller? Should be no surprise then that of the 30 billion dollars of tax debt The IRS has assigned to collectors, they have only received 500 million in return. Tax enforcement is not very well understood but Peter’s opinion that the IRS’s ability to enforce the tax code is so lax that perhaps a majority of tax debtors could simply not pay for 10 years and avoid paying altogether. 

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This may be a simple reason for liking a post, but I had never thought about the tax planning aspect of demolished bits of houses. 

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A tax bonus for sinners? Maybe the USA can still turn around.

My partner and I put Peter up to write about Bachelor Clues, a host for a popular The Bachelor podcast. We did not know it would result in my father, a man who has not watched The Bachelor and felt he didn’t need our preparation, being interviewed by Clues on our favorite Bachelor podcast. It remains the strangest episode to date.

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A “fan” review of the legal opinion that closed a case regarding the valuation of Michael Jackson’s estate. This is a genre of writing I’d love to see more. A 1-10 rating system for legal opinions, with separate expert and “community” reviews. I’d love to know the tomatometer for every supreme court argument.

I’ve tried to get Peter to write more clickbaity articles (‘6 reasons CPAs should steer clear of syndicated conservation easements – you won’t believe number 4’)  to little avail. However he holds himself to a high standard, and this word of warning to fellow CPAs is a good example of what he values.

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Easements, easements, easements – 

Karen Slaughter is actually someone I know of- unlike the madcap tax dodgers my father usually casts for his posts. Doesn’t stop Peter from asking, just because I lived in the same state as his current obsession, if I’ve heard the name of some weird millionaire trying to deduct horse semen as hobby loss. 

This one is personally great to me because I’ve been blind-sided by self-employment tax, however not as badly as my delivery driver friend who had not only not saved enough for his tax burden, but had also been penalized by the individual mandate. 

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Plaintiff wants the IRS to keep him out of their press releases. Peter kind of sides with the plaintiff on the basis that the IRS should just be a deciding body and let reporters do the reporting. He’s biased of course, but I agree with him despite being biased against him and all of his interests. I think they’d be better pretending to be a silent, threatening, mobster-y organization that you’d better get your taxes to on time. If a meme from the IRS TikTok account goes viral, or some other weird foray into the public perception happens to be noticed, I can almost guarantee it would drive compliance down.

Good news for tax planners worried about this change, BBB is pretty much guaranteed to not be happening. Still, I chose this post because it’s really technical and people affected by it might not have a clue and might not have the financial cushioning to withstand a blindsiding like this. 

This one is great – It’s a compact story about headless bureaucracy sewing distrust. Peter is coaching a business owner through what’s essentially a glitch in the IRS, and the difference in how they understand what caused the situation is chilling to me. 

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A good guy with a good guy plan who committed just a little bit of fraud? I kind of like this one because it just reveals the misgivings that my father has around suspected white-collar crime. Running afoul of commingling funds and having enough expenses that aren’t well documented to have the book thrown at you. 

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